Don't Speak Too Loudly
by raining-down-hearts
Summary: Hamlet-inspired fantasy Soma AU. "So if you bleed red, we're good, and I'll talk about whatever deal you wanna make. If you bleed black, I'm going to-" Leave him there, trapped, to die a slow death of starvation? Murder him in cold blood? She shivered, and it wasn't only because the night air had begun to chill her soaked clothing. "I'll know you're dangerous."
1. Chapter 1

"You'll stop waiting after a year, right? Like you promised?"

Tsubaki had her arms wrapped around herself, probably in an attempt to keep from strangling Maka to death or simply straight-up kidnapping her, but she nodded faithfully. A dry summer wind kicked up, carrying the pungent scent of corroded metal and pollution that was constant in this part of town. "Yeah. I promise. I still think-"

"I know, I know," Maka interrupted, letting Tsubaki hug her _again_ anyway. It was grounding, to stand in her best friend's strong warm arms, and she had a panicky sort of feeling in her stomach that was proving hard to smush down, now that it was _really _time to leave. The few people walking by this early in the morning were giving them rather suspicious glances, and she'd just had to threaten the guards twice to get them to even agree to let her out. It was useless without a hunting permit, at least until they recognized her relation to Asura and hastily gave in. "Don't cry."

"I'm not crying," said Tsubaki, crying just a little. It only made her prettier. She went into her usual Mom mode and started patting Maka all over. "You've got your water purifier? And your fishing lures? And flint? And- here, take another knife. Just in case. You never know when you'll need another one."

"I am currently in possession of exactly seven knives, six of which are from you," Maka snorted, taking the offering by the hilt anyway and sticking it in her left boot.

"Well, now you have eight," Tsubaki said stoutly, dark hair blowing wildly in the sour wind. "I love you."

Maka closed her eyes in near-desperation. Something rabid in her chest pricked its ears as the guards began to wind the gates open, gears older than time screaming horribly in protest. "I love you too."

"Come back home, okay?"

"I will when I figure out what happened to my dad." And why she was hearing voices, but Tsubaki didn't need to know that. It would only make her worry more if she thought Maka was going nuts while _also _trekking alone through the shattered remnants of what had once been. Not that she hadn't noticed the change in her best friend, of course; she had, with her typical keen-eyed and merciless empathy, but she'd assumed it was due to Spirit's mysterious disappearance.

"That's not what I said."

"I'll try."

"That's a lame way to leave," Tsubaki muttered, brushing her glossy bangs off her face.

"Yeah, I know. I'm sorry." She _was_ sorry to leave Tsubaki, deeply and ferociously, but she was also deeply worried about her missing father, who had skipped through these very gates three months ago to, "Go do some scavenging and some trading, and oh, maybe I'll bring you back a new book, sugarplum, and your mother too if I run into her!" and vanished into the ether like a damn ghost.

Tsubaki only sniffled and began to look suspiciously damp-eyed again, little stars blooming in the corners of her beautiful eyes. Maka took Tsu's face in both palms, held tight, and said with as much conviction as she could muster, "Don't worry. The rumors are all exaggerated, anyway, how many times have you and I gone hunting and been just fine? I'm too tough for the old cities to get hurt, and I know that's where he went, it's the only direction we haven't looked. He's just _such _an idiot. He probably got his foot stuck in something, or fell in a hole, and we'll be back in a week, but- I've got to. But I will come back, I- I promise."

Tsubaki looked appropriately grave, even though she'd heard all Maka's rationalizations before. "Good," she said fiercely, gripping Maka's wrists tight for a moment. "Now go on."

Maka went, with leaden feet and buzzing ears, fingers gripping the straps of her backpack so tight it hurt. It was exactly eighteen steps from where she had stood with Tsubaki, to the outside of the walls; she counted as she went, watching her feet scuffing up dust clouds, because she was terribly frightened she'd give up entirely if she turned back to watch Tsubaki's face. It was very different, walking away from the city alone. She stood there with her back to the walls, listening as the guards grunted and cursed and finally tortured the rusty gates closed. The thump of the giant iron lock-bar on the inside was quite final, and then she was all alone, standing on the bridge of the long brick moat and staring out at an infinite ocean of gently swaying, golden grass. The wind had subsided a little, but the rush of the water beneath her was still overloud to her taut nerves. The din of the city was still audible too, but dramatically lessened, as if simply closing those gates had pushed her into another universe, an even emptier one.

"Okay," she said firmly to herself, squaring her shoulders. "Let's do this."

"..._faster_…" answered the voice in her head, the deep impatient one like stones rubbing together.

"_And it's about…. time... you need to… go to the warmer places," _said the other voice, which was still masculine but much higher in pitch, with a silky-smooth, polished cadence absent from the other.

"Don't boss me around," she said rebelliously, still unsure if her own insanity could take orders. Could a brain order itself to stop doing something?

Sadly, she didn't think so. If that were possible nobody would ever be stupid or afraid- two things Maka felt very much at the moment. Anyway, she didn't need voices in her head to tell her she needed to go south, to the cities and away from the protective, forested water systems cradling her hometown.

The things in the cities couldn't cross water.

Her father could, though, and he was both impulsive and curious enough to explore.

"_Not the word I'd use, but…" _said the silky voice rather wryly, in a rare almost-complete sentence.

She put her hands over her ears, then dropped them. It did no good. "I'm going, I'm going," she mumbled, but it took a long time for her to force her feet to move in their new, dangerous direction.

The two gigantic twin statues that flanked the other side of the bridge and marked the symbolic entrance into the vaster world, identical but for the tattered wings one bore, watched her approach. They witnessed her going past with equally patient indifference, though the delicate veils carved over their faces hid whatever they might have thought of it.

She really was losing it all over again, not yet ten minutes into her journey, but it was hard to care when there was stuttering almost-harp music echoing in her ears, the same amateurish music that had put her to sleep for weeks now. At least it was a pleasant enough sound despite the frequent mistakes, unlike the annoying arguments of the two voices.

The crackling yellow grass rose to her hips when she waded into it, and she plucked a sweet-tasting stalk to place between her teeth, the way Tsubaki always did. _Now _she was ready; she hefted her bulging backpack higher on her shoulders and went forward, overly aware of her own pounding heart and the morning sun warming her left shoulder. The nearest city, the one her father was most likely to have gotten into trouble at (and he _was _alive, he was, he was) no longer had a name that anyone remembered, but it was only four day's walk, three small streams and one actual river away. That was doable; Maka could walk for four days easily enough, and ford a river with equal success. Her father had seen to that, rather surprisingly, because he hadn't ever taught her anything else. It was too hard for him to focus on a daughter, as much as he loved her, when his true heart was out wandering the ruined world, having left him only a nearly identical scrap of child to remember her by.

"Maybe he found Kami and they're just camped out somewhere," Tsubaki had suggested. "You know last time she came into town they shacked up for, like, weeks and didn't come up for air once."

That was true, and Maka had considered it, but the likelihood of her mother tolerating Spirit for any reason other than sex or needing a place to stay during her yearly drop-in for supplies was ludicrous. Everybody knew that Spirit worshiped her, had bound himself to her with unbreakable chains, and everybody but him knew that the Albarn women were dangerous and could not love. The elder loved nothing but herself, and the younger had left no space in her life for anything but bared teeth and a house full of scavenged antique books, books that smelled warm and dusty and had nothing to do with anything any more.

"_Can't bear to think…"_ said the deeper voice.

"Yeah," Maka answered, for no reason, and she kept trudging on, parting the grass like Moses but feeling much more like Cain, cast aside into the wilderness. A flock of white birds that had been scavenging for food took flight at her approach, bursting from cover in a wild, frantic flurry. She almost cowered, and she flung her hands up instinctively; the birds swarmed away, and she stood there panting, aghast at her own foolish reaction.

Finally, once she got her pulse back under control, she pulled the final blade Tsubaki had given her from her boot, unsheathed it, and held it tight in her hand. The hilt was elk horn, polished and varnished to glossy beauty and carved with two delicate flowers, and the blade itself was shined and oiled to perfection. Tsubaki had made it, in her shop with her own two hands, folding and tempering and putting love into the molten metal. It had been Maka with her when they bagged the elk, a day after Tsubaki's twentieth birthday, just like a gift.

The tears came now, in an unstoppable flood. She hadn't realized it was _that _knife, but trust Tsubaki to manage something sappy and sweet even without actually being present.

The ocean of grass swallowed her up again in moments, and the birds came cautiously back down to earth once she had passed, sending a few annoyed croons after her. When she finally looked back, hours later when the sun was bright overhead and her shadow nearly gone, the massive veiled statues were gone. She couldn't even see the walls; there was a tiny smudge of black on the horizon from all the smoke, but that was all. There was only rippling gold on every side of her, and the infinite blue of heaven's vault arching above.

The air was clean, though, and she took deep breaths as she kept going, scouring her lungs with it, Tsu's knife warm in her palm.

* * *

On the first night, the wolves came, circling her in an endless, snarling carousel of glinting eyes and clicking fangs. She built a fire bigger than she needed and huddled close to it, reciting fairy tales to herself with a voice that shook just a little. They sniffed and howled, but then they left her for easier prey.

"Smart move," she said softly, relieved for both parties and resolving to give her dad a real piece of her mind for causing all this worry when she got ahold of him.

"... _reminds me of him,_" said the silky voice, and the rough one gave a hum of agreement that reverberated like distant thunder in her teeth. It was still early enough in summer for the nights to be a bit chilly, but the stars out here were her favorite part- in the city, the sky was nearly blocked out by the tall buildings, but out here, she could see it all, spread out above her. The star-strewn vastness was comforting, even with the wolves still howling off in the distance; she lay close to the embers of her fire looking upwards for a long time, wondering what Asura had gotten up to in her absence and how Tsubaki was faring. Tsu would keep him from doing anything nasty to Maka's little apartment, but if he decided it was time to make his move, without her dad there to keep him in check- well. Who knew what Maka would return to?

On the second day, she snared a pheasant for dinner, and while she was plucking it, she heard the harp again- this time clearly being destroyed. That was the only word for it. It was a cacophony of vicious off-kilter notes, snapping strings and clanging metal, punctuated by hideous cougar-shrieks that sent her to her knees, clutching her head. It lasted for maybe ten minutes, which was just long enough for her to recognize the screams as coming from Rough Voice- strange, because she would have sworn those sounds could come from nothing human.

"Are you okay?" she asked, rather involuntarily, once it was over and she was curled on the ground in a pile of gloriously bright, bloody feathers.

Silence, silence, and then, "_Did you hear that?_"

Maka held her breath. She would have stopped her own heartbeat too if she could, and the wind, and the rustling of the grass, but it was useless. "_...nothing there, we…_" said the silky voice, rather regretfully, she thought.

She took it out on the rest of the pheasant and left the bones for the wolves. The voices did not comment.

On the third day, she was walking with aching legs, rubbing her thumb across the carved flowers on Tsubaki's knife over and over and staring with bleary eyes into the unchanging yonder, when she literally tripped over the first sign of the approaching city.

It was a road, hemmed in with thick grass and brush that had hidden it upon first approach. It was black, smooth and very flat where still whole, impossibly and artificially perfect despite the many places where roots and weather had twisted it.

And- "It goes south," she whispered into the breeze, setting her boots tentatively on the strange surface and rocking back and forth a bit. It didn't have much give. Concrete or asphalt; she remembered the words from her mother, but she didn't know which she was looking at, or even what the difference was. It wasn't one of the lost technologies, but nobody in her hometown used it. The roads were packed dirt or gravel, because as Asura said, "There's no point wasting funds we might need one day to defend the town." Now that she was standing on it, she could see a few tiny flecks of white here and there, like the road had once been borne markings. She wished she could have been able to read them, to take this road at the height of the cities' success and into one of the libraries her mom had told her about, so many times, the beautiful sanctuaries for the written word where everything and anything ever dreamed of could be learned.

"._.. just remnants and that… iron left, we…eight_." said Silky Voice.

"..._water there_…" added Rough Voice, not very helpfully.

"Can't you two tell me a story or something? And be useful?" said Maka, rather dismally. The voices did not reply. Probably she should be more excited about that, considering that 'hearing things' was a pretty good indicator of having gone completely off the deep end, but she wasn't. They were weird, and mostly just frustratingly hard to hear, but they'd been company of a sort over the past few days, and she was eager to keep pretending she wasn't alone. In the city, it was always crowded, always loud, and even the hunting parties she'd joined were never smaller than three people. Did her mother feel as Maka did? Did the silence and the roaring wind rattle her bones too, till she felt she might fly apart? She and Maka were similar in many ways, from their cautious green eyes to their hair-trigger tempers, but somehow Maka could never picture her mom cowering beside a fire at night. Kami needed no one but herself. She would be striding along right briskly, wherever she was, cutting through the terrain like a ship at full sail, perfectly at home in her own head.

Speaking of being trapped in one's skull, Maka did wish she'd had space to spare in her pack for at least one book. If she hadn't already been crazy, she'd be pretty close to it by now, with nothing to fill her mind but the voices, and her own circular worries and fears.

On the evening of that same day, after hours heading south on the black road, which smelled rich and strange as it heated in the sunshine and which frequently shot smaller copies of itself off into the grass, branching out like the veins on her wrist, she came to the big river.

That, of course, she'd expected, and anyway she'd caught the lush scent of it on the air long before she actually got within sight of it. The collapsed bridge was more of a surprise. The black road led up onto the beginning of it and a little past, straight between two towering iron pillars webbed with dangling cords of metal and rust. Only a few vines had tried to take over the thing, and they'd made a desultory effort at best, though moss had had a bit more success. It took a long time for her to figure out that the towers, which shed rough orange flakes of fragile corrosion when she touched them, must have been the supports for the part of the bridge that was long gone- the part she _needed_, that had presumably once led safely over the unexpectedly wide, churning river.

"I don't _need _it," she told herself grumpily, thumping her first on one of the towers again and watching bits of rust drift down. An orangish smear stayed on the side of her hand. "It would just be easier." Though the river had turned out to be quite a bit bigger than she'd anticipated, and it was moving uncomfortably fast near the center. She'd have to follow the banks for a while, and try to find a gentler spot to cross.

"... _completely unacceptable_," snarled Rough Voice.

"Fuck you," she said automatically.

"... _fresh meat, except they already blooded it and…"_ he added, still sounding irritated.

Ominous words to welcome her here; how wonderful. She got down on her hands and knees and crawled as far forward onto the bridge's remains as she dared, then craned her neck over the broken edge of the black road and looked down.

Two bright red eyes met her own, along with a loud, "Oh _crap!" _She only just managed to stop herself on the edge of a shrill scream; after all, the guy was easily fifteen feet below her, standing up to his knees in the shallow but still rushing water close to the bank.

He said nothing else. He seemed frozen, actually, a lot like she was; they both stared at each other in stunned silence. He was young, around her age, or at least, not old; there was a curious sort of indistinctness about his angular face, despite a very stubborn chin and almost childishly large eyes. Finally she found her voice and said, a little sharply, "What are you doing down there?"

"What are you doing up there?" he fired back promptly, pale brows settling into a rather haughty glower beneath the really ugly green hat he wore.

"I asked first," she snapped.

He eyed her warily, squinting a little against the low angle of the setting sun. His shadow was very long across the water. "Go away," he said finally.

She didn't move, though she did draw Tsubaki's knife quietly, keeping her movement behind the edge of the road, out of his view. "Why don't _you _go away? I plan on camping here tonight and fording the river in the morning."

He shifted his weight a little, and now he was _definitely _scowling at her. "Nope. I told you once, go away. Now. Chop chop, weird girl."

"Who made _you _king?" Maka said, annoyed. "Fine, whatever. I'm warning you, though, if you think you can sneak up on me during the night and steal my gear, I'll catch you, and I have a lot of knives. Okay? And I have very good hearing."

"You can't threaten me," he said, sounding rather shocked.

She actually laughed, for the first time in quite a while; she laughed so hard that she ended up on her belly clinging to the edge of the road, drumming her feet hysterically and wiping her eyes on her shirt. "I just did," she chortled at last, gasping.

He looked horrified, and didn't answer, though his strange eyes narrowed even further. The ugly hat covered his hair, but his eyes and his very pale eyebrows made her think he might be a person with albinism; only his skin made her wonder. It looked almost gilded, rich and glimmering even in the shadows beneath the bridge, as if he'd rolled around in metallic dust, and she had thought it was simply the play of shadows and sunrays, but-

"You're one of them," she hissed, realizing with an almost painful shock.

"I- wait, one of what?"

"From the _city_, Jesus! You're not human!" The red eyes caught the bloody sunset light in a scintillating display as he tilted his head further back to look at her, and at this new angle, when he opened his mouth to say something, she saw innumerable glinting points. Terror and adrenaline turned her cold as she gripped the road's crumbling edge. "You have- you have three seconds to turn around and get out of my sight or I'll come down there and exterminate you myself!"

She was bluffing. On a hunt, if there were signs of anything from the city lurking around, the only options were to hide or to run home, and most chose the latter. She'd never 'exterminated' anything she hadn't been intending to eat later, except maybe a few squashed spiders on occasion.

He snarled in earnest now, baring those predatory teeth, his warped overlong shadow dancing like a demon on the rippling water. "I can't, and I'd like to see you try, pipsqueak!"

"_What _did you call me," Maka screamed, infuriated, and then she realized- "Wait, you're in the water!"

"Ye-eees," he said slowly, as if she were stupid. "And?"

"Augh! You can't- but you can't _not _be- this doesn't fit the criteria!"

".._. something, I know, it had to be, I recognized_…" yelped Silky Voice, at an ear-shattering volume; Maka grunted and toppled backwards into a kneeling position by the bridge's edge, clutching her head.

"-you out of your pixie-cursed mind?" said the red-eyed man from below, adding to the clamor. "I am not one of those- things! I just… I like it here, specifically right here in this exact spot, and I refuse to move, so there!"

She breathed slow and deep until the ringing in her ears stopped, and then poked her head cautiously back over the edge to study him better, sheathing Tsubaki's knife for the moment. He hadn't budged an inch, which both soothed her instinctual panic and made her wonder if he really _was_ trapped there somehow.

Well, only one way to find out. She worked a loose chunk of the black road's edge loose, took careful aim, and dropped it on his upturned face quite neatly.

He doubled over, clutching his head, but didn't move his feet. "Merlin and Morgane! What the hell was that for? You can't _throw _things at me, you- tiny little girl!"

"You keep pointing out that I supposedly can't do things which I just did two seconds ago," she told him, giggling a little behind her hand despite the surreal situation. The teeth could conceivably be false, or his real ones filed down, she supposed, and his skin could be some kind of cosmetic. Maybe he really was just albino, in which case she would owe him a _huge _apology and also probably something tasty for dinner. "Okay. You're in the water, which means you can't be from the city, but you're… unusual looking for these parts." Her curiosity, always lurking and always hungry, poked its head up at that. "Wait, are you from really far away? Are you lost?"

He prodded gingerly at his face, which looked fine to her; obviously he was just a big baby. "Yes," he said finally, looking up at her again. The sun was a breath from disappearing entirely under the horizon now, so she took a moment to rummage in her pack and pull out a pre-made pitch torch and her prize possession: an ancient Zippo quite literally older than she was, with more dents than she had freckles and inscribed with the initials 'WS'. It was a gift from her mother, scavenged in some lost corner of the world many years ago. Buying rare, expensive butane on the rare occasions merchants actually had some was a pain in the ass, but the lighter was waterproof and powerful, and it lit the torch in half a second.

She lifted it up and crooked her neck over the edge to look down at him again. "Which one is it?"

"Er. Both, I guess," he admitted, sounding disgusted. Her torchlight reflected off the water and ringed him in a choppy circle of firefly glints, multiplying his sinister shadow into a hundred shattered clones. "I'm not _from _here, which I think you guessed, and I'm definitely lost."

"And also stuck. How exactly are you stuck?"

"I- are you going to help me or not?"

"Of course," she said in utter exasperation, pressing her bangs down irritably as they blew into her eyes; it was windy on the bridge, though it wasn't all that high up. Her apartment balcony was about a zillion times higher, and she'd long ago gotten used to the vertigo of looking down. "I mean, look at you. I'm not worried, of course I'll help. Are you even armed? Where's your stuff?"

"Around," he ground out, after a moment of fumbling. Clearly it was a lie.

She squinted down at him and considered. No way a person, however weirdly dressed- was that _lace_ on the cuffs of his jacket?- could survive out in the open without at least some basic equipment, and the fact that he didn't seem to have any made her wonder if he had company lurking out there somewhere. "I don't believe you."

He took a deep breath, pinched the bridge of his nose, and muttered something that sounded suspiciously uncomplimentary under his breath. "So then you're not going to help me."

"_Yes, _I am! I help people!" Maka said heatedly, stretching to hold the torch further out so he could better see her angry glare, and if she 'accidentally' dropped an ember on him, so be it. "I am a _helpful _person, okay, but I'm not an idiot, just you need to explain a few things first before I-"

She was falling before she realized it, along with several large chunks of black road. There was no time to scream; water filled her mouth before she could finish taking a breath. The last thing she heard, just before the night swept in and her head began to crack apart, was the fizzle of her torch drowning in the river.

* * *

"_... strange is going on, and I can't figure… unusual, and it's all sort of reversed, which… Titania disagrees, of course, the snake," _said Silky Voice.

Rough Voice gave his signature brain-rattling irritated hum, which hurt enough to make Maka open one eye, though the multicolored velvet that filled her swimming vision didn't make any sense until she also felt lace brush her skin.

"Fuck," she gasped, lashing out instinctively; she got dropped again a second later, right on her ass into the dark water.

It woke her up the rest of the way, and she staggered to her feet, wondering if her skull was _actually _inside-out or if it just felt that way. The red-eyed man, holding her torch aloft and still up to his knees in the river, looked infuriated. She stared at him warily, then sloshed a few steps further back. At least her backpack and Zippo were presumably still safe atop the bridge; obviously she'd only been unconscious for a very short time.

He growled like the wolves. For a moment, she was so dizzy she swayed. "You're kind of a bitch, aren't you? First you toss a rock in my face, then you try and _crush _me, then you try and drown, and now you-"

"Ow," she managed, lifting a hand to pat at her soaked head. It hurt a _lot_, but there was no blood or swelling, though her hip was starting to ache like she'd landed on it. If the voices started up again, with her head in this state, she might just cry.

"Yeah, ow! I said ow too when you bashed my face in with the _rock,"_ snarled the guy.

She took another shaky step back, feeling water in her boots, and stared at his teeth. They were uniformly sharp, and his canine teeth were elongated, like her own but on a more exaggerated scale. Again, she was reminded of the wolves. What was it her mother always used to say? "Go on your way," she whispered, through the haze of white-hot agony clawing its way out from behind her eyeballs. "I am sending you out as lambs in the midst of wolves." And wasn't that just the funniest thing for Kami to say, when it was her own daughter she left among all the gnashing fangs.

"_Again! Come here, I heard it again, listen!_" roared Rough Voice.

Maka clenched her jaw, hard enough that a wave of burning anguish swept through her from pounding head to chilly toes, and forced herself to meet the red-eyed man's gaze. If this was some elaborate ambush, there would have been no point allowing her to wake up, and he _was_ still in the exact same spot he'd been in. The broken bridge arched halfway above them, a dark mass blocking out the stars.

His green hat was disheveled, and wet, like it had fallen off and been hastily retrieved, and the white feather tucked into it was broken, hanging limply. His clothes were wet too, even his many-colored coat, which was sporting quite a few rips- he must have had to really stretch, to reach her where she'd landed. There was no sign of weaponry on him; actually, he looked sort of helpless and ill, now that she was paying attention. That strange shimmering skin was sunburned pretty badly, and dark circles showed under his eyes.

He was still now, watching her watch him, with a sort of contained emotion that she couldn't read, but which had him nearly vibrating. It might have been suspicion, or unwelcome memories; whatever it was, he was trying his damnedest to hang on to his poker face. "You," he said at last, "are having some problems, huh?"

Maka frowned. Something about his deep, gravelly voice seemed sort of familiar, in the vaguest of ways, a tickle at the back of her mind, but she didn't have time to think about it. Instead she began rubbing the back of her neck in the slow, firm way she'd learned sometimes helped with her headaches and said hoarsely, "Yes, but lucky for you it's none of your business. Now." She drew Tsubaki's knife from her boot. "Tell me how you lit my torch, because I _know_ I put my Zippo back in my pack on the bridge, and you're too wet for matches to work."

He looked away from her. The torchlight shadowed his face into a ghoulish, jack-o-lantern caricature; she suddenly felt a little embarrassed, as if she were seeing through to his bones. "What are you talking about?"

"It went out," she said grimly, starting to circle him with careful steps. "I heard it." The rocks were slippery here, treacherous with clinging algae, and the current had a passionate grip on her ankles that would become much crueler just a short way further out.

She wasn't _really _expecting anything wild to happen. She was sort of hoping he'd pull out another Zippo or something similar, maybe, some interesting bit of lost technology; she was trying to buy time, to see in the darkness what was holding him in place, and why his _teeth _were so-

But he held out a hand calmly enough, opened his palm, and on his bare skin bloomed a breath of dancing sparks, then earnest, leaping, fairy-tale flames.

Her dizziness returned. "You'll burn yourself," she squeaked idiotically. The river pushed harder at her heels, driving her away from him; she went without resistance, backing towards the bank as he held out that spinning ball of joyous fire, unable to tear her eyes away from it, mesmerized and afraid.

"Chill _out," _he groaned, closing his hand around the fire and extinguishing it with a bitter twist to his lips. Smoke curled up from his fingers for a moment, soft and white in the torchlight, like an ascending spirit. "Look. How 'bout we make a deal?"

Maka was panting now, open-mouthed like a dog, from a weird cocktail of pain, adrenaline, and confusion. This didn't _fit. _Humans could not make fire from nothing with only their own flesh, not even in the old days, the ones in her books- nothing on earth could do that, nothing that wasn't a legend, anyway. What was she supposed to do in the face of something she'd never imagined?

"_The horsemen and their messenger…" _said Silky Voice, unhelpfully.

Maka looked up at the black mass of the broken bridge again, then across the river, where the black road went on into the night. "You tried to jump, didn't you?" she guessed, mouth dry. "And you didn't quite make it, and once you hit the water… You couldn't cross it. You were trapped where you landed."

He sneered, but it was halfhearted. "What exactly are you implying?"

She gritted her teeth, considered, then pulled another knife from its sheath on her hip and held it out to him gingerly by the blade, leaning far forward and stretching her arm to stay as far away as possible. He took it after a moment, with a dubious expression. "Show me your blood," she said grimly. What she was about to propose was, without a doubt, insane, but so was she, so what did it really matter?

Anyway, she was curious, which obviously took precedence, and she needed solid proof before she could form any proper conclusions.

"Huh?"

Idiot. "Show. Me. Your. Blood," she enunciated, rolling her eyes.

He wrinkled his nose, which was severely freckled under the sunburn and the shimmer. "Why? Listen, you know, I can ask rude questions and be suspicious too! Why are you out here all alone? Why do you need to cross the river so bad? What's- what's over there?"

"Didn't you come from that direction?" she said sharply.

"It's- yeah, but- you're not, uh, from there. Obviously."

The curiosity snowballed; Maka was a little afraid she might drool. "You live in the _city?_" Impossible- but so was the thing she'd just seen him do. It had to be a trick, of course, but it was a good one.

He pressed his lips together, clearly uneasy and just as clearly confused by her line of questioning. "No. Just that direction. Listen, why do you want to see my blood?"

If he _had_ lived in the city, he'd know why. Obviously he'd told the truth at least about that. She decided to treat him like he'd been under a rock his whole life or something, like he didn't know anything at all. "The things that live in the old city kill people," she said finally, edgy again now that he was armed, despite having done it herself. "They're like animals, but they're not." To put it mildly. "They can't cross water. So that's why I thought you were one of them."

Crossing his arms and scowling, he radiated offended dignity, which was quite a feat considering he looked like a particularly morose wet mop at the moment. "Hey! Are you saying I look like an animal?"

"That is _so _not the point, but yes, actually, you've got big bad wolf teeth and a bird brain! Now stop interrupting me! Anyway, so that's why I've come from the other direction. There's quite a few more rivers up that way, so it's a lot safer. And the things in the city all have black blood." She shrugged, wincing as the movement made her aching head twinge again. Her hip was _really _starting to hurt, too; doubtless she'd have one hell of a bruise in the morning. "So if you bleed red, we're good, and I'll talk about whatever deal you wanna make. If you bleed black, I'm going to-" Leave him there, trapped, to die a slow death of starvation? Murder him in cold blood? She shivered, and it wasn't only because the night air had begun to chill her soaked clothing. "-know you're dangerous."

It was rather freeing, being insane. She thought she might grow to enjoy it.

But he was wide-eyed, and he actually glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the old city, where the black road led; stranger and stranger. "Fine." With little fanfare, he jabbed the tip of her knife into the tip of one finger, on the hand that was holding the torch, and then extended both the hilt of her knife and the finger in her direction.

It did look dark, in the poor light, but it was red enough for her to heave an embarrassingly huge sigh of relief. She stretched out on tippy-toe to take her knife back, then, on second thought, threw it onto the bank and out of reach, while putting Tsubaki's blade between her teeth. There was no point in letting him disarm her while she helped him, human though he apparently was.

He looked even more confused when she sloshed up to him and grabbed his wrist. He nearly dropped the torch and actually yanked away, hard enough to make him have to windmill his arms to stay upright, and said, "What the fuck?"

Maka blew out an irritated huff of breath and put her fists on her hips. Why did everybody always need things spelled out to them in excruciating detail? She pulled the knife from her mouth and said, "How long have you been stuck here?" She'd get the 'why' out of him soon enough; her curiosity about how someone who bled red could affected by water just like the things in the city had grown several sizes and was banging on the walls.

"Er-"

"Judging from the sunburn, at least a full day. So you can't move on your own. _So, _someone else is gonna have to do the moving for you." She put Tsu's blade in her mouth again, grabbed his cold wrist, pulled his arm over one shoulder, and crouched to try and heave him up out of the water. The first try failed pathetically, and on the second, her boots slipped and she half-fell. "Could you be any heavier?" she mumbled through clenched teeth, persevering and increasingly less gentle.

"Oh, okay, excuse me! Maybe it's your fault for being so short- _oof. _Ow!"

"'I'm helping you, don't be rude," she mouthed breathlessly around the knife, finally managing to heave his stomach onto her shoulder, gripping his knees tight before standing. Well, crouching slightly less; the guy was a good foot taller than her, and he wasn't scrawny. Her knees were already shaking. "And don't you dare burn me with that."

He only wheezed something unintelligible, though he did try and help hold himself steady; apparently her bony shoulder was digging into his stomach. How sad.

It was only perhaps twenty steps to the shore, but she had to set him down twice to catch her breath, and when they finally made it, she was gasping and dripping sweat. At least the exercise had warmed her up.

She wanted to collapse on the dry, grassy shore, but first she trotted over and began hunting for the knife she'd thrown. He was working the toe of one shoe into the soggy sand with a soft crunch, but he didn't otherwise move; he just held the torch up higher to give her better light.

"Thanks," she said stiffly, finally spotting her knife and grabbing it up. The sudden movement disoriented her. Everything was deepest, softest grey outside the orange circle of torchlight, like a quiet dream. "Um- so what deal were you talking about? You don't owe me for helping you, or anything. Well, maybe just a few answers." A fresh wave of adrenaline hit her suddenly, until her blood buzzed, and she rubbed her thumb over the carved flowers on Tsu's knife. He was free now, this unnatural, impossible man, and though she was armed, he had strange fire she didn't understand. Why was he holding the torch still, anyway, if he could make his own fire to see by? Was it hard for him?

He stuck the torch between two rocks, kicked off his shoes, then bent over to start squeezing water from his trousers. "Yeah, thanks… too. Thank you. And I don't know, really. I was going to offer to show you where the city was if you got me out of the water, but now that I know there's monsters and shit in there, no way. It was deader than Arthur when I went through."

"You were _in _the city?" she yelped, flapping a hand. "Wait- but you didn't- you didn't see anything? How long were you in there? What's it like? Are there plants and animals?" Her father had always refused to talk about what he saw on his scavenging missions, and her mother simply never made any sense.

"Yes, no, I'm not sure, I don't know, and yes." He raised an eyebrow at her, and for the first time, she glimpsed a lock of whitish hair poking out from under that offensive hat. "What's your name?"

"Why?"

"Well, in my head I've been calling you 'the really fucking loud girl' but I have a feeling you'll hit me again if I say it out loud."

"_... if only, the woodpecker cried,"_ said Silky Voice philosophically, sounding very tired and sad. "_...be all right, in the… find him."_

Maka began rubbing her neck again as exhaustion set in, doubled by the pain until she felt almost drunk. "Albarn." No one except her parents and Tsubaki called her by her first name, not even the voices in her own head, and thought it was fleetingly tempting to give it to this person, to _someone_, she resisted. She was one of the Albarn women, the cold and wild ones, and she would not let the label shame her, even with frostbite creeping in.

He inclined his head graciously; for a moment, she had the absurd impression he was going to dip into a bow. "You can call me Soul."

"Which insinuates it's not your real name," she said, snorting. "Ugh, paranoia." And thus she was a hypocrite, which made them quite the pair. "So tell me, what are you? Are you human or not? No bullshit." There was a question she'd never expected to ask. Three months ago, before the voices began, she'd have long ago run screaming from a man who could make fire.

He closed those eerie red eyes for a moment, swallowing audibly, then croaked, "Mostly. You're- human, then. You live in this land, you have your whole life?"

An icy finger traced her tense spine. "Yes."

He pulled the hat absently off his head, squeezing it dry and discarding the broken feather. Apparently his hair really _was _white, as white as bleached bone even at night, and he had an awful lot of it going unpredictably in every possible direction. "I haven't- listen, I don't know what _you _know, so what other things do you think exist?"

"What? What do you mean? Rephrase that."

He plopped the hat back on his head and held up a hand, ticking each point off as he made it. She watched his long fingers move, looking for smoke or fire, but there was nothing except that indistinct shine. "Humans. Animals. Beasts of the sea, and beasts of the air. Insects. Bacteria, viruses. The things from the city. What else do you think exists? Apart from, uh, space and shit."

Maka's heart was so loud that didn't think she wouldn't have been able to hear the voices, even if they'd chosen that point to chime in. She thought about it, hard, because she always took questions seriously, and because he seemed to think it very important. Finally she shrugged and said sulkily, "Nothing else. Not even in the old books. I suppose there could be- I've found stuff about legendary-type things. Like dragons, and unicorns. But those weren't real, even when there were lots of people." At home, she had at least one book on _everything_, and though many pages were missing or stained, she was confident in her answer.

Soul- what an odd nickname that was, and a little disconcerting, yet _so _appropriate at the same time- hummed thoughtfully, low in his throat. She appreciated that he was staying well away from her, but it still made her nervous when he found a boulder to sit down on, near the flickering torch. Framed in the boulder's black-velvet moss, and shrouded in perfect darkness on one side and too-bright flames on the other, he looked like someone who'd been feeling too many things for too long. "Have you heard of fairies?"

"Yes, but they're not real."

"Have you heard of parallel dimensions?"

"_Yes,_ but that doesn't explain anything!"

"Have you heard the stories the humans used to tell? About a land underground, where time moved differently? Where the fairies live?"

Yes; of _course _she had. Maka read so much that Tsubaki used to say she had ink in her veins and paper for skin, and long-forgotten fairytales had kept her company in the long, dark nights alone. "What's that got to do with anything?"

"_Maybe,_" chimed in Rough Voice.

He made an atrocious face. Then he sighed and pulled off his hat, swiping a few particularly wayward strands down flat, before angling his head to present her with the side of his face.

His ears were sticking out from under the ghostly dandelion-puff hair, long and pointed and just a little freckled. As her jaw dropped, one gave a surly twitch.

* * *

Author says: okay! So, first of all big thanks to ba-sing-saying for betaing this for me ;) this is a (vaguely) hamlet fantasy au. It's gonna be soma, and it's gonna be tsustar at some point, and all/most of our fave characters will show up at some point, that I can promise. I can't promise super duper regular updates (college, work, adult life and other lame shit, sorry!) or what direction this super-weird thing will go in, but i can promise i won't abandon it. And um, let me know what you guys think if you can, because this story got weird fast and I'm really wanting feedback. it's sort of experimental, i guess. Love you guys! thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed! :) :) OH: and yes, the theme of Spirit being missing was in Dire Circus, I know, I realized, I guess I'm just predictable, haha. Sorry. I was too lazy to come up with something else.


	2. Chapter 2

Bit of gore ahead, watch out if you're sensitive to blood. In fact this whole story will probably have several few gory bits; beware. I mean, probably not much worse than Dire Circus, nothing insanely detailed, but I'd rather warn you guys ahead of time than scare somebody.

&amp; thanks for all the reviews! I really appreciate the response, guys! love you and thanks for reading! bit of a short chapter, sorry.

* * *

"You really are a fairy," said one of the voices, distant and terrified. It took Maka too long to recognize it as her own. Her lips felt numb, and her trembling hands, and her feet as they wavered between forward and back. She could practically feel the old pages of her fairytale books between her fingertips, and smell their rich decay. Unicorns and demons, angels and deep-sea beasts, tricksters and gods, and _fairies_, the whole pantheon had kept her company on the long nights alone, when the city shook and Asura raged. Her beloved characters had been the voices in her head that didn't _terrify_ her, and now-

"You're a fairy," she repeated, licking her lips. The repetition made it no less surreal. Soul watched her with nervous, wet eyes and a cruel sneer, rocking back and forth just slightly on his boulder with his hands crammed into his pockets. "You- you're- you've got fucking _ears-_"

The amateur harp music began again in the back of her mind, haunting and strange, each missed note pulling on her pulse until she was sure she would die, and her hand rose almost of its own accord as her feet finally decided on _forward. _Hadn't the voices broken the harp? But it didn't matter.

His hair, brushing the back of her hand, was petal-soft, and his ear felt only like skin.

She'd surprised him. The wide eyes got wider and the sneer got more vicious as he leapt up and away, batting at her hand. "Don't touch me!" Then he jammed the hat back down on his fluffy head and crossed his arms. "Yeah, I've got _ears_, big whoop. So do you, if you hadn't noticed." Tone dry as a bone, but his nervousness showed pink on his face.

"That's _impossible_," she informed him as reality finally reasserted itself. "Fairies don't-"

"Exist?" he said wryly.

"Yes!" She had gone insane, but she wasn't stupid.

He blinked at her a few times, thinking, then finally gave a shrug so vast it seemed to encompass every question he'd ever been asked. The torchlight caught and traced the sharp line of his jaw in a perfect curve of copper. "Fine, whatever."

She gave him a narrow glare, batting away a white moth that had shown up to die in the torch. "Fine." There was no call for her to be entirely rude, though, even if she'd managed to run into the only other crazy person in the whole ruined world. Her father was waiting and she had no time for Soul, whatever he was, but the least she could do was point him towards her hometown, the closest within hundreds of miles. "Listen, if you're headed to Gethsemane, it's about three day's walk due north. You can follow my trail, it'll be pretty obvious. Take a right off the road about when you see a flat-topped hill in front of you." The harp music- a little different than she was used to, smoother, as if it was a different instrument- swelled, then stopped abruptly, and she caught her breath. "Uh. Good luck."

He nodded a little. She wrenched the torch free- he could make fire, he obviously didn't need it- and circled edgily around him before heading back up the broken bridge to grab her backpack.

She glanced back once as she headed forward into the inky night, following the churning river. He was still watching, and looking almost angry; before he faded into the dark, she saw him pull his hat down tighter.

"A fucking fairy," she whispered in harsh wonder to the murmuring river. Hallucination or not, she'd touched him, brushed a fingertip across that shining skin, and he'd been warm and real enough that, even as the night wore on and the forbidding bone-white moon rose higher and higher, she didn't quite manage to rationalize him and his fire away.

"More on Heaven and Earth than you ever read about, huh, baby?" her mother would say, with just a hint of coldness on her beautiful face. Maka found herself walking faster and faster into the empty dark, almost wishing for the wolves.

* * *

For a short girl, Albarn took big steps.

She walked like it was the only thing on her mind, her tattered boots _thump-thumping_ heavily and her wide green eyes glazed and hungry, fixed on the horizon. Even with his much longer legs, Soul had to hurry to keep up. The late-morning sun was hot above, but the river to the right was sending off sweet, cooling breezes that reminded him agonizingly of home. There was little beauty in this world, and the birdsongs were all sad.

It would be a lot freakin' _easier_ if he could just walk next to her, but she'd made it pretty clear last night that she didn't want him to follow her, so here he was, fifteen feet behind and sweating beneath the full weight of his camouflage magic. It was annoying, and the urge to throw pebbles at the back of her head was increasing every moment-

She paused, still staring at the horizon, then broke into a dead run, hurdling rocks and brush like a deer. Black birds flew up like broken hearts.

Soul said very quietly, "Fuck!" and then, as the compulsion began to prick his heels, he growled and followed.

It wasn't like he hadn't thought about letting her drown, when she came toppling down from the bridge. It'd crossed his mind, of course. But he'd waited, shocked, and she hadn't _moved _for long seconds, excepting a few bubbles and a twitch of her submerged hand, and entirely on instinct he'd reached out for her.

He might as well have picked up a viper. It would have been less violent when it woke up- and then she'd _carried _him out of the damn water like an insane Hercules, and he'd had no choice but to play damsel in distress and let it happen. Soul could practically hear Kid's stupid fancy voice in his head, too, admonishing him. "Didn't you _know _about the life debt?" Soul mimicked raggedly under his breath, between gulps of air. He loathed running, and of course she was half cheetah. "Didn't you _know _what happens when a person saves a fairy's-"

"Quit following me, you lunatic!" she screamed, whirling around and staring right at him, despite the camouflage magic still tingling over his skin.

He tripped immediately on nothing and skidded into the grass and dirt with a choked yelp before springing to his feet and checking the status of his hat. "How the _shit _can you see me?" he panted, befuddled.

She had her hands on her hips, that ever-present knife a silver claw in one as she glared. "With my eyes, birdbrain," she screeched. "I thought if I ignored you you'd leave! Do you have any idea how creepy it is to _run after_ a woman who's alone, out in the middle of nowhere? What, you wanna fight? Bring it on then! I'll kick your ass!"

He gaped at her, aware of the dirt decorating his entire front but unable to quite gather the wits to brush it away. "I- you- you can see me?"

Albarn squinted at him, clearly thrown. Now, in the daylight, he could see the almost bland perfection of her features: small, pert nose, a small, thin-lipped mouth, large hooded eyes, and dirt absolutely _everywhere _beneath bangs made stringy by sweat. Despite all her ranting, she didn't look all that worried, either, which made him think she knew how to use that knife. It wasn't a comforting thought. "Was I not, uh, supposed to? Be able to see you?" she said finally.

No, no she was not. Human vision, he knew, was limited to reflected light that fell within the narrow visible spectrum of about 400 to 800 nanometers in wavelength. Kid had drummed that sort of thing into Soul's head over and over until he was sure it would pop, in a desperate attempt to help him figure out how to use his magic properly. It had _sort _of worked- camouflage was one of the few things he could manage now, though it hadn't helped him much at the moment. Right now his skin was reflecting only ultraviolet light- bumblebees could see it, and fairies, but not humans.

So what in Nimue's name was Albarn?

He looked at her feet, getting his breath back and thinking. Whatever she was, and she clearly wasn't going to tell him a damn thing- suspicion was stark and cruel on her stern face, and he couldn't blame her- he was stuck with her. It would probably be pretty stupid to let her know he'd caught on to her secret.

Maybe Kid's politics lessons hadn't been wasted on Soul, the Youngest and Most Disappointing Royal Son, after all.

He squared his shoulders, started brushing off the dirt, and grumbled, trying for diplomacy, "No, but I guess you can see me, so it doesn't matter. Listen, I don't think you're gonna like this, and believe me I don't either, but I have to follow you around until I save your life. I- augh, dammit, I owe you. It's a fairy thing."

Albarn fell into another laughing fit, until she actually had to sit down, wiping her watering eyes. "Oh, okay," she wheezed, clutching her ribs. "Right. So I've got a pet fairy now! Fantastic. This is exactly what I needed. Perfect."

As a master of sarcasm himself, Soul didn't appreciate having any aimed at him, thank you very much, so he showed her his teeth and opened his hand, letting a whip of fire blossom up and out.

"I'm nobody's pet," he ground out, nettled. At home he was a voluntary shadow, living in Wes's wake and praying to all the spirits that Titania wasn't in the mood to make anything bleed; at first, when she'd dumped him here, he'd been both furious and afraid, but after a while- before the hunger- a thread of vicious joy had crept darkly in. Accidental life debt or no, exiled or not, he wasn't about to give that unaccustomed freedom up.

Albarn was instantly sober, on her feet so fast he barely saw her move, and there was nothing dreamy now in her calculating expression. The knife flashed in the sun.

He had the sudden, piercing thought: Something's chasing this girl, and she's getting tired of outrunning it. Were the lives of all the humans left so hard, now that the fairies had done what they did to the mortal earth? He complained about the lack of beauty here, but he knew where it had gone. Guilt put out the fire in his palm with a sizzle and a snap, and he held up both hands in a gesture of peace. He was so, so tired, and life debt aside, simply talking to something besides the wind was nice.

"All right," Albarn said then, rather unexpectedly, framed like a priestess among the waving grass and the blazing blue sky. "Fine. You can tag along. It won't hurt to have someone watching my back when we get to the city."

Right. Monsters. "Yay," said Soul, very unconvincingly.

With a final warning glare, she started walking again.

* * *

"Albarn. What's the name of the river?"

She didn't even blink. She just kept charging ahead like her feet were afire.

"Hey. Uh, Albarn," he tried again.

"I don't know. Maps are hard to find," she said shortly, casting him a single pinprick glance out of the side of one eye as if his very existence was presumptuous.

He scowled and tugged his hat down moodily to better cover his ears, just like the blue-haired boy had taught him so long ago, the first time he'd been sent to this awful graveyard of a world. What was his brother Westing doing, back home? Was he alive and whole, or had that snake bitch Titania gotten to him after all? Heavens only knew what fresh hell she'd thought up for the court. Fear put fresh speed in Soul's steps. "Whatever."

"Sorry," she mumbled, and it actually sounded sincere. "I wish I knew, too."

"Eh."

The silence swelled again. Of course, it wasn't _really _silent. The odd, fearful birds here- that refused to come say hello, annoyingly- were twittering all about. The river was gurgling, the wind was blowing, and the soft whispering of the tall grass was a deep and distant song. Still, it felt wrong to him, and eerie. He didn't remember things being like this the first time, though of course he'd been young then. The first time there had been a long line of laughing people and colorful wagons winding in a fallen rainbow through the land, musical and alive, and even as a lost child he hadn't been as afraid as he was now.

This Albarn girl, though, was the furthest thing from laughter. She was dying from the inside out like a diseased tree, and it made him tense. He couldn't fathom anything she did: why she'd hauled him from that blasted water, why she'd let him tag along as they hunted for a place to ford the river, why she wanted to go to that apparently lethal city in the first place. And why hadn't any of those things she was afraid of approached him when he was there?

"Why didn't you let me drown?" she asked, out of the blue. Obviously he wasn't the only one confused.

"I don't know," he said, honestly enough. It had simply seemed like the thing to do.

She said nothing for a while, still forging ahead. After an hour or three- time here still didn't seem natural to him, and the short days were always startling- she froze in her tracks, took two short sharp breaths, then folded in on herself like tortured origami, clutching her ears.

Soul found himself backing away as she hissed pure agony. It only lasted a few moments, though, and then she shook her head roughly and straightened up, grinding her teeth. She looked almost ashamed, and her face was very pale.

"Sorry," she said brusquely, not meeting his eyes. "That happens sometimes." And then she was moving again, tirelessly, her rapid footsteps telling him that the earth might burn her to ash if she stood still too long.

Soul followed, keeping just a little more distance between them. After all, even her pained breathing was better than the empty, fathomless loneliness he'd been trapped in since Titania banished him here. He'd resigned himself to death after the first day in the water, had stood there numbly and tried to lose himself inside his memories, until she materialized out of nowhere, his temperamental saviour.

He gnashed his teeth quietly. Why was _she _allowed to ask him ten million questions, call him a damned liar, and then march off, but he only got an answer out of her maybe one try out of three? Had the humans really forgotten about his people so quickly?

_They _forgot _because we abandoned them, and then we- well, you know, _his brother would say, always sticking up for humans. But it wasn't as if the fairies had _meant_ for the human world to turn upside down. Not even Titania would have done it, if she'd known. Familiar guilt burned at his tight throat, and he watched her tense shoulders shift with each swing of her arms, wondering what she would do if she knew the truth- and if she, or anyone here, would ever believe him.

There were periwinkles growing in the damper spots along the riverbank, clumps of rich blue echoing the sky, and he idly plucked a bloom here and there as they went, weaving them together into a crown.

Albarn actually goggled at him when she finally noticed. "What?" he said, wondering if it was already falling apart. His flower-arranging skills had always been mediocre at best.

"Uh, nothing," she said, eyeing the wreath with extreme suspicion. "Listen, do you wanna-"

She stopped dead once she noticed her surroundings, right in the center of the fairy ring.

Soul cringed, but she only blinked and stood up straighter, looking around at the circle of flattened, trampled grass. "Huh. Deer or something."

"Yeaaah," said Soul, standing up straight to peer down his nose at her, trying to look like he understood what she was talking about. Then he got distracted for real. "Hey. Trees! Or something. No, that way."

She popped up on her tippytoes, surveying like a gopher. "Ooh! Okay, bird brain. Let's go."

"We're already going," he mumbled irritably to himself, giving the fairy ring a wide berth as he followed her.

"What?"

"Nothing."

She grunted, gave his wreath another frown, then said, "You talk under your breath a lot and I keep thinking it's… something else, can you maybe keep it inside your head like the rest of us?"

"Whatever." What on earth was going on with her?

Not that it mattered. He was _stuck_, trapped at her side as surely as he'd been trapped in the stupid river. He'd find out eventually.

The smudge he'd spotted on the horizon did indeed turn out to be trees, though it took them the majority of the remaining daylight to get close enough to tell. The mostly flat terrain was deceptive, apparently, and Soul was stumbling more than walking when Albarn finally stopped.

She raked him with an unreadable glance, crossed her arms, and said, "I don't think we should go in there."

"The trees?" he said, confused again. It seemed to be his natural state of being lately.

"Yeah. Um, I just… We don't know what's in there. And we still haven't found a place to ford the river, not one I can carry you over, anyway, so I guess we should just camp here and head back to the bridge in the morning."

"Why?"

"_Because _I don't want to get too far from the city, birdbrain. We'll backtrack and then go west instead of east when we find the bridge again."

"Thanks for taking all my suggestions so seriously," he snapped. "Fine."

Her eyes narrowed. "I didn't hear you coming up with a plan!"

"That's because I don't know shit about this world!" he roared, frustration and fatigue finally overcoming the last shreds of his self-control. When he dragged a hand down his face, he was a little surprised to realize it was on fire. It had been a long time since he'd had any sort of spontaneous magical outburst at all.

It felt good on his skin, friendly and pure.

Albarn was making a sound like a teakettle. He raised an eyebrow at her. "What?"

She stared at his hands, clearly struggling between fear and curiosity. Finally she said, "It doesn't burn you?"

"Do I look burned?"

The teakettle sound made a brief, startling reappearance before she flung up her hands and set her giant pack down on the grass, pulling out an incredible array of knickknacks. Soul found himself edging closer almost without realizing it, fascinated. There were several shiny metal things, which fairies generally didn't mess with out of tradition and instinctive dislike, despite being able to touch it now without dying unpleasantly. There were small leather packets, a funny-smelling blue contraption that reminded him of things he'd seen in the city, a disappointingly ugly blanket, clothes, a ridiculous number of knives-

She tossed one at his feet. He jumped and slithered backwards.

"It's for you," she said, not looking at him. "Just in case. I'm gonna go try and find us dinner. I just realized you probably haven't eaten in a while. Sorry."

"All right," he managed, swallowing, then stretching out a hand to grab the knife. The cold iron of the blade didn't singe the fingertip he pressed to it, but he still had to fight back a shudder.

"Can you make us a fire?"

Could he? And why? "Yeah."

"Thanks. I'll be back in a few hours, max." She didn't move, though. Instead she stood there waiting until he met her eyes, and then she said icily, "If you fuck with any of my stuff, the truce is off."

It was the first he'd heard about a truce, but whatever. "I'm not gonna fuck with your weird human shit!"

She snickered, not unkindly. "You don't know what half of it is, do you? I'll show you when I get back. But some of it's kind of valuable, so seriously, don't mess with it." Without further ceremony, she plunged into the taller grass further from the river's edge. For a moment her blonde hair blended perfectly with the swaying tips, then she was gone, leaving him holding her knife.

"Er," he called helplessly, feeling the life debt already give a warning tingle. "Don't go far, okay?"

She must have heard him, because Soul spent the next hour and a half only a little uncomfortable, rather than actually foaming at the mouth. He managed to get a fire going, promptly stomped it out in a panic as embers began to fly up, made another one that was much smaller in a slightly more rocky area, and then settled in beside it, absently throwing in bits of brush at irregular intervals and occasionally giving the tiny flames a boost with his magic.

It felt strangely easy to do, which was something to think about, but he caught the smell of fresh blood in the air and perked up. Albarn materialized from the rapidly darkening shadows not five minutes later, three colorful birds swinging limply from one hand.

"We got lucky," she said cheerfully. "I love how stupid these things are."

His mouth was watering. "Cool," he managed, licking his lips. His cramped stomach gave an agonizing twist.

She didn't seem in any hurry to feed him. Instead she sat down on a rock, stowed some wire away in her pack, and began poking the flames higher while pulling feathers delicately, one-by-one from the first bird. "You could _help_," she pointed out at last, and, permission granted, he practically lunged for one of the birds, ripping out handfuls of feathers with ravenous haste before sinking his teeth into the succulent breast.

Albarn gave a choked half-scream, red-smudged hands flying to cover her mouth; he raised his gaze to her inquiringly, then remembered.

"_Don't do that in front of anybody," _the blue-haired boy had said, very seriously, his small dirty face scrunched into a terrible frown. "_People don't forget bad stuff here. You gotta cook your food, okay?_"

"Shit," Soul barked, dropping the bird and leaping to his feet. "Sorry, sorry, I forgot! Don't flip out!"

He could feel blood wet and still warm on his chin. She was frozen, one hand over her mouth still and the other clutching her knife. A pile of rainbow feathers surrounded her like the silks of an empress, and the firelight turned her eyes to warmly opaque, glittering gold.

"Don't move," she whispered, very still herself, and he didn't. They stayed in their nervous tableau, with only the popping flames and their own panting to fill the air, until she finally said in a stronger voice, "What the hell?"

"I forgot," he admitted, swallowing and only just stopping himself from licking his lips. That single bite had brought his appetite back to life with a roaring vengeance; he felt almost blinded by hunger. "I forgot you humans don't eat raw. Sorry. I didn't- it wasn't to startle you or anything."

"Oh, right," she muttered, shaking her head a little. "Of course. If I ate a bird raw I'd probably die. Or I'd be so sick I'd want to. It really doesn't- that's how you like it?"

He settled for a nod, his gaze drifting to the bird.

"Can you just turn around and eat?" she offered finally, nose wrinkled.

He rasped, "Yes!" and then pounced again, whirling around and diving back into his dinner.

He tried to keep it quiet, he really did. Judging by Albarn's frequent, irritated huffs behind him, he wasn't quiet enough, but he couldn't _help _it. He devoured the first bird so fast that his long-ignored stomach felt like a painful knot of cramps and nausea, but the hunger was still there after he went over to the river to clean his face and hands.

She was holding out a second bird to him, already plucked, when he turned around. It was the closest she'd stood to him since carrying him out of the river that morning.

"But that only leaves one for you," he pointed out.

"I'm smaller than you and I'm not the one who got myself stuck in a river and then starved," she volleyed back, rather forcefully and looking displeased with his protests. The final bird was impaled on a stick over the fire, and Soul sneezed as a strange, rich smell hit his nose. "Besides, I'd rather not have to slow down for you tomorrow."

"Fine. Thanks." He ate this one with a lot less mess, though there was a brief moment he was afraid he might puke it all back up as his abused stomach protested. When he finished, cleaned up again, and rolled back to the fire in a drowsy haze, Albarn was delicately picking the last flesh off her cooked bird, a neat pile of bones and gristle arranged atop the feathers beside her.

"Scraps in the river," she told him firmly, standing up and sucking her fingers clean. "Don't wanna draw anything to us." Her bones made a series of soft plops like rain as she tossed them far out into the water; Soul followed suit, with much effort, then flopped back down beside the fire, idly sifting through the scattered feathers that remained. None of them seemed right for his hat, though.

She offered him water next, from the odd-smelling blue cylinder thing. "Purifies it," she said shortly, in response to his curious expression.

"Oh," he said dubiously, eyeing the thing for traces of unicorn horn and finding none. But the water tasted sweet on his parched tongue.

He wanted to ask her more questions, he really did, especially about the things she'd pulled from her pack, but it was dark in earnest now, and he'd been keeping up with an indefatigable, tiny force of nature all day on an empty stomach. Before he knew it, he was asleep beneath a far-flung velvet canopy of endless stars.

* * *

Maka was surprised. He snored, soft little wheezes with each breath through his slightly open mouth.

It just didn't seem like the sort of thing he'd do. It was too mundane, and yet too weird. During the day, he'd slowly settled in her brain as eccentric (and possibly another, particularly _corporeal_ hallucination) but mostly she'd seen him as harmless. Even when he'd torn into the raw pheasant like a starved dog, that categorization hadn't changed. Maybe he was creepy in some ways, yes, but all his grouchy huffing and puffing did was remind her of a bullfrog, inflating to look bigger.

When she'd given him her knife, he'd held it upside down without realizing. Obviously he wasn't familiar with weapons. He'd followed behind her all day long and never tried anything except a few halting, tentative questions and some mild insults. He hadn't complained, despite surely being very hungry and tired; a twinge of guilt hit her when she remembered how hard she'd driven him, without even noticing his ragged state till they'd made camp. When she'd been overwhelmed by the voices, he hadn't fled or attacked, and he'd passed her final test; she'd strewn out all her valuables and then hidden in the grass, watching under the guise of 'hunting'. Yet, given the perfect opportunity, Soul hadn't touched anything.

"_...not really… expected, and the… tomorrow, I'm sure," _said Silky Voice, sounding even softer than usual, grief and an attempt at reassurance heavy in his words.

Rough Voice gave his usual, annoying hum. "_Titania's driving me mad… about the wings, I swear."_

"Yeah, absolutely," Maka put in quietly, feeling a little left out. Nobody answered. Soul's soft, whistling snores gave gentle counterpoint to the gurgling river and the nighttime symphony of insects.

She still couldn't quite fall asleep, though. Soul had cleaned himself up after his messy meal, but she'd gotten a smudge of pheasant blood on the toe of her left boot, and scrub as she might with a handful of sand, the stain refused to fade.

* * *

:) :) thanks for reading!


	3. Chapter 3

They made it back to the broken bridge the next evening, and Maka tried to pretend that her worry wasn't fast decaying into breathless terror with every passing sunset. _Dad's fine, he's fine, I'm not too late,_ she chanted to herself silently inside her mostly-quiet head, and she tried to distract herself by setting camp as Soul made them a fire for the evening.

He did it as casually as she would flick her Zippo. One rough-sounding rub of his fingertips together, a spray of incandescent sparks, and, magically: flame. He cast a dull red glare at her after getting the pile of brush burning, too, like he was waiting for her to make fun of him.

She was jealous, and angry, and she wanted suddenly to shove him down, to scream at him for the absurd impossibility of his existence, which had wrenched her own further out of order. Everything he was fought with everything she in her, rationality and logic and dependable science, and every hour she wished he _was _a hallucination more and more. If he _were _then she could yell at him without feeling guilty, and she really wanted to scream at something besides the wind. Gethsemane sucked in a lot of ways, but at least there was usually somebody who deserved her ire there.

"I've gotta go get dinner, birdbrain," she said abruptly, shaking away phantom music from her buzzing ears and striding back out into the evening.

"Don't go too far," he called nervously, the same as he had yesterday, and just like yesterday, she let the grass hide the obscene gesture she aimed his way. He was lucky she didn't throw another rock at his face, quite frankly; apparently by feeding him yesterday she'd opened some inner toddler-sized floodgate that wanted to know _everything_, right now, it's very important, why can't you stop being such a bitch and just answer my questions, Albarn, come on, what about _that_?

"_I think the jaw's the key," _said Silky Voice, very professionally. Something that sounded like glass gave a clank.

"Yeah, I wanna punch him in it," she muttered, kneeling down to set a snare just as her mother had taught her so long ago.

"_...say so, but I don't think there's anyone… listen," _said Rough Voice, sounding tragic.

She finished setting the snare, then got up and moved off before she could scare anything away, sighing all the while. The plains were drenched in dreamlike purple shadows now, in the late evening; they'd been walking all day to make it back to the bridge, with the uncrossable river gurgling mockery on their left, the stupid thing. Soul had been relentless in his barrage of questions, and she hadn't quite been able to shriek at him the way she'd wanted, not with the wonderment so open on his shining face.

Maybe it meant he trusted her, or something, because yesterday he sure hadn't been talkative. Maybe he was a useless idiot who needed constant babysitting to stay alive. She scowled and set another snare.

"Albarn, why's that bird doing that? Albarn, what's this river named? What's this puddle named? What about that bug?" she mimicked, but it was half-hearted. She wondered uneasily just how different his world and his life were from her own.

The sky began to boil with heavy black clouds, and the shadows grew deeper, but after a while, and some deep breathing, she made her way back to Soul with dinner in hand, in a rather better frame of mind. Less homicidal, anyway, which was something.

He was lying on his back beneath the arch of the bridge, long legs stretched out and crossed lazily at the ankles, nothing but a moonbeam shock of pale hair and a vague, pale moon-face pointed her way. She saw him hastily snatch up his ugly hat and plop it back on as she came closer.

"Here," she said, feeling odd. The only other people she ever fed were Tsubaki, who was basically family and thus didn't count, and her father, who was also family. It felt strangely intimate, to give him food. The pet analogy came to mind again, and she wrinkled her face sourly.

Maka Albarn was _not _a pet kind of person, though she did secretly have nicknames for her books.

"Thank you." He swiveled around, and then, _crunch crunch crunch. _She winced and started to pluck her own bird, digging some fruit jerky out of her pack first to gnaw on in the meanwhile. Meat alone would give her nothing but scurvy.

"What kind of things do you hunt back home?" she said idly.

A suspicious pause. Out in the darkness, something gave a lonely cry; Maka bent more industriously to her work. "Whatever's left."

"Left from what?"

Another pause, even shiftier, and she saw his scrawny shoulders bunch in the firelight, that many-colored coat turned all to languid sunset oranges. "There's not a lot of animals around anymore," he finally settled on.

It was a poor attempt at a lie, and he even twisted around to eye her over his shoulder, as if gauging her acceptance. She flashed him a bland ghost of a smile. It wasn't like it mattered, and obviously he didn't want to talk about it.

The harp music had begun again, resonating from one side of her skull to the other, multiplying and swelling until she thought she would implode from the effort of containing it in her mere mortal flesh. It seemed like the musician was getting marginally better, though; she caught fewer curse words as he went.

"Fuck," said Soul, tripping as he tried to edge around her backwards to get to the river and wash his presumably bloody face.

"I've seen it before," she snapped, finally getting her bird over the flames.

He said nothing, only crouched down. She heard rocks shifting, and some splashing, and then he returned clean-faced and sat across the fire from her, looking straight upwards as he leaning back on his hands. The flames cracked and popped industriously, and her cooking pheasant sizzled, and the wind rose to a haunting moan, delicate counterpart to the harp's moody dirge.

When she slipped out of her boots and peeled off her sweat-stiff socks, stretching her aching feet out lavishly in front of the fire, they looked too ghostly compared to Soul's shimmering skin, like a corpse's. She had a swollen red blister on one heel, and it burned in time with her pulse. She wasn't even sure what she looked like anymore, what showed on her face. "It's going to rain." She accidentally said it out loud at the same time as Silky Voice said, "_There's really… other option!" _and for a moment, she was horribly confused and a little afraid she'd lost control of her tongue.

What would be next to go? What part of her mind, her self, would she lose next- and _why?_

"Yeah!" said Soul, sounding entirely too excited; she sent a raised eyebrow his way, and he promptly refocused on the flames, tugging his hat down harder and hunching his shoulders. Already she'd noticed and begun to envy a way he had about him, when he wasn't puffing out his chest and putting on a scowl, of curling in and disappearing- much more effective than whatever he _thought _he'd been doing yesterday.

It was a good thing he seemed to like rain, she thought dismally about twenty minutes later, huddled tight up under the overhang of the bridge's remnants and staring at the steaming, ashy orange embers of their dying fire. The blackness was enveloping, and she didn't want to waste a torch, so instead she tucked herself into a space between two mossy rocks, looped an arm through the strap of her pack just in case, gave Tsubaki's knife a tap, and closed her eyes to the symphonic static roar of raindrops.

"Albarn. Hey, Albarn."

_Ugh. _She opened one scratchy eye and did her best to glower in the general direction of his face. If that bitch karma had stuck her with not only a pet fairy, but a _night-owl_ pet fairy, she would positively lose it. "What?"

A faint hiss, a vague whiff of rich-smelling smoke, and his face was lit horror-story style by a handful of flames. Funnily enough, it made him look more normal; she barked a laugh a little too loud, accidentally knocked her head on a rock, and finally said again, "What?"

"That. Er, those, I guess. Look. " Twisted around and half-kneeling, he lifted his fire and jerked his chin towards the wall behind her, a curved slope of uniformly rectangular bricks swathed with moss.

"_Oh,_" she breathed, scrambling closer and puffing her cheeks to blow dust and dirt off the wall. Soul leaned away and gave her a deeply disgruntled look, but didn't put out the illuminating fire.

She hadn't seen it the first time at this bridge, possibly because of a certain white-haired idiot who needed rescuing (and common sense), but now it was revealed, framed by the ragged fringes of dancing night and animated by flickering flames. It was a mosaic of color, patchy and worn but so pure still that she had to clench her fists. There were leftovers of words as tall as she was, in angular, stylized letters, an 'ell' and a lonely 'm' and an emphatic exclamation point dotted with a skull. There was the hunched, blue bulk of a rabbit-shape, superimposed with the rabbit's perfect, lovely bones. There was a pair of wings at the top of the bridge's curve, white stained with the years to a softer gray, and there were horses near the bottom, tossing proud heads and manes in an invisible wind, red and black and white and muddy dun.

"_...tomorrow, west… and your fingers are bleeding," _said Silky Voice, sounding immeasurably sad. Maka lifted her own numb, shaking fingers to stroke the head of the red horse and was surprised when they were clean. "They're really pretty," she said softly, feeling as if she was in church.

"Weather cold as you," Soul breathed, and she jumped. When she turned her head to look at him, his mouth was hanging open in awe as he stared at the patchwork rainbow wall. "Fuck you, Billy's a whore, uh, a _lot _of numbers… another fuck you…fuck your mom, northbound, rock on, wish on a star…"

He was reading the smaller writing scattered over the wall, she realized, blowing out a breath and scooting away. Those words were from a hundred different hands, and she felt now as if there were eyes on her, eyes from long ago.

"It's cool, right?" he said distractedly, poking at the rabbit's ribs.

"Yeah," she admitted, chewing on the inside of her cheek. "Thanks."

His brow furrowed beneath the heinous hat. "Duh."

As in, duh, of _course _he'd wake her up and show her this super-weird and interesting thing _right now_, instead of letting her sleep and showing her in the morning? She huffed, but let it go. She'd probably have done the same thing, anyway. Discoveries were exciting.

It grew chilly as the rain kept falling, and she drew her knees to her chest and tried to lull herself to sleep watching the clean sheet of it where the bridge overhang sliced it off, a perfect noisy surface of ever-changing light, and the pitch-black river making music beyond. Far away, thunder boomed, and Soul whispered, "An Icarus dream is the wrong kind… _another_ fuck you… oh, look, a fuck off, that's new, ha…"

She opened her eyes once, before he put out his fire, and looked straight up at the painted wings. They were torn in places, smeared, she saw now, and through the filmy veil of almost-sleep misting over her eyes, she glimpsed a single reddish fingerprint on one smudged feather.

* * *

"We'll cross here," Albarn croaked, rubbing her temples. He could see the muscles in her jaw flex as she ground her teeth, like she wanted to tear the distant city apart for whatever it had done to her.

Soul hadn't enjoyed his time in the city, but he didn't _hate_ it the way seemed to. It had been echoing gray and too-perfect stones, rusted ripping metal and bleak _absence_ when he'd made his way through. It had been a shell, a tomb, dotted with the occasional drooping tree or skittish animal, and smelling of grief. It was nothing like his home, and yet- it had echoed the same way when he shouted, which was somehow worse. She wanted to leave this wonderland of skidding clouds and open skies and endless freedom, for that eerie place?

Well, he was pretty sure she didn't think like he did. Maybe it was a human thing, or just an Albarn thing, but it was obvious in the sharp way she still watched him if he moved too fast, and her stubbornly private behavior. Wouldn't most people, human or not, have _told _him by now why they were going to the city, especially since he was being dragged helplessly along?

Though- he hadn't _asked._

"Fine," he agreed, like he had a choice, looking out at the _slightly_ shallower sweep of river.

It was just as awful as he'd anticipated, if not more. She waded nearly to the other side, he started to sweat under the life debt, she shouted something he couldn't hear but which sounded insulting and came sloshing back, a nasty glint in her eyes.

During the ensuing hour of horrendously touchy-feely, bruising hell that followed, in which Albarn dug clear through his stomach to his spine with her bony shoulder as she hauled him across the river bit by bit, he had an epiphany to the soundtrack of her verbal abuse.

He was _free, _out from Titania's clutches, and he wasn't going to die as long as Albarn was around. She was fucking valuable, like a pocketful of dragon opals or a bushel of bluebird feathers, and what would Kid tell him to do?

_Keep her around, use her, the way Titania used the humans and their world to change ours, the way she used your parents, and still uses Westing,_ Kid would advise, the familiar, reluctant coldness in his golden eyes. _Fight fire with fire._

It felt like a gross way to think, but he didn't exactly have a lot of options. Probably his eventual goal should be to get back home at some point, since in this current 'here' he didn't have any sort of future at all, but he wasn't in any rush to say the least. The longer he gave Titania to get over her fury, the better, and he still wasn't totally sure how time even _worked _between the two worlds. The day length still felt subtly wrong to him. First things first, though. "Can we please build a fire and dry off?" he asked, hating the timid uplift of the question.

She paused where she was kneeling by the riverbank, wringing out her pigtails, and directed a particularly intimidating stare at him. "I was hoping I could convince you to wander off somewhere so I could wash up, actually."

"_Oh,"_ he very definitely did not squeak. He'd sort of forgotten she was a girl under all the dirt. "Yeah, totally, I'll just-" He pointed somewhere and ran. A scratchy chuckle followed him.

When he came slinking back half an hour later, she was scrubbed and pink, in different but still ragged clothes, and her hair was down. He stubbed his toe on a rock staring at her.

"What?" she said sharply.

"You look weird clean," he blurted. He hadn't realized how big her eyes were, or how long her hair. She looked much more civilized and less like she might just rip his beating heart out of his chest if he sneezed at the wrong time. She looked almost relaxed. Maybe she wasn't always- the way she _was. _Maybe she was just stressed out? The weird headache-things probably didn't help. He, having been judged constantly from the moment of his birth, suddenly felt rather guilty for putting her so firmly in the category of 'useful but bitchy, do not antagonize'.

She was also eyeing the crown of dandelions he'd made during his mini-exile. "You like flowers, huh."

"Uh, and my hat's ugly right now. I lost my harpy feather."

"Uh-_huh."_ Albarn grinned to herself, looking amused. Her teeth were straight, blunt, and totally unnatural; Soul shivered. Then she tossed something at him. "It'll be too small for you, but it'll give your stuff a chance to dry."

Apparently that was her polite cue for him to wash his clothes; he tried to take a discreet sniff of himself and winced. Yeah, it was time for a wash. Nothing would kill him; it would take a whiff and run away in fright.

She wandered off, already tying her hair up in precise twin tails. She had the exact kind of hair the ladies of the court back home would envy, perfectly straight and very fine, good for braiding and elaborate styles. Soul stripped and soaked his clothes, and then managed a sort of bath, standing awkwardly by the very edge of the river and splashing himself with handfuls of water to avoid getting stuck. The water at _home _never behaved so rudely. It made him feel very out of place in this world, or more so, anyway, like everything in it was rejecting him.

Maybe it knew what he and his kind had done in Titania's mad reach for a mythical promised land. He shook his wet head hard enough that drops of water flew everywhere as he pulled on his damp undershorts and the shirt Albarn had given him, which was indeed too tight, especially about the shoulders. It smelled girly, too, and was a disappointingly drab navy blue color. His wrists felt naked without the scratch of lace.

He gave the sandy dirt a little pat and whispered, with a lump in his throat, "Sorry."

* * *

They made it to the city the next morning. It appeared rather suddenly, looming up out of the low, early fog that wreathed the plains, the forbidding grey ramparts of a giant's castle. Maka found herself walking faster and faster towards it, the carved flowers of Tsubaki's knife smooth under her circling thumb and her father's face foremost in her mind. They were on another black road now, wider, and edged at irregular intervals with tall, weathered metal signs. A discomfiting number of them read aggressively "STOP". More creepy omens; wonderful, and Soul twitched whenever he looked too long at something metal. Maka sighed and frowned up at the gloomy skyline of the city, only a few miles away now. There were a lot of tall, decrepit buildings poking up from the dissipating mist like the fangs of a vanquished leviathan.

"Shouldn't we sort of scout around or whatever?" Soul mumbled, tugging his hat down till it practically covered his eyes and casting paranoid glances all around.

"For?"

He huffed. "Oh, I don't know. Those _things_ that you said eat people, maybe!"

"_Almost there… more, and we'll… tell him," _said Rough Voice.

"You're not a person," she pointed out, but she made herself stop and took a deep breath. "Yeah, I guess it couldn't hurt." Even when sane, she _did _have a bad habit of getting emotional charging in blind: into Asura's office when he did something _else_ corrupt, into a dark thicket of trees on a hunt, into an unknown city while accompanied by a weird fairy...

He jammed his hands in his pockets and waited expectantly, hunching his shoulders. She sighed. Truth be told, she was a little nervous, now that she'd _finally _made it to the city. More than nervous, really; she was terrified she would find nothing about her father, or worse, that she would find the wrong _something. _But if she named it, it would rule her, so she took gritted her teeth and shoved it down deep.

She looked around, feeling stupid. _Scouting_, he called it, honestly.

There wasn't much to see, except for the usual infinity of gently rolling grass, currently melting into the fog, and the city. The road was black beneath their feet, and the sky was dawning violet. There was a patch of flowering vines crawling across the road, and she could just glimpse the pale bones of something long dead at the side of the road. A few long-necked geese passed quietly overhead.

"I don't see anything," she told him, trying to be reassuring, as if she hadn't drawn Tsu's knife and held it ready half an hour ago. "And I don't hear anything."

"Erm-hmm," he mumbled, slouching harder until his shoulders bumped his ears.

"_Go on, then," _said Rough Voice, sounding as nervous as Soul looked.

"Hello? Hello there," Silky Voice added. "Hello?"

"Holy _fucking _shit!" Soul shrieked, leaping backwards with such vigor that he stumbled and fell completely off the black road.

"What?" said Maka bemusedly, taking a leap back herself and clutching Tsu's knife with two sweaty hands, looking every which way.

"It talked!" he said loudly, fighting clear of the enveloping grass and looking with wild eyes at something behind her. He'd lost his hat, and his long ears were pricked forwards.

"Hello! Hello!" said Silky Voice.

"There it is again!" Soul yelped, falling on his ass into the grass again.

"What the hell is going on!" Maka roared, spinning around in a full 360 and totally confused.

"Hello? Can you hear me?" said Silky Voice, and she whipped around, quite suddenly realizing two important facts: one, Silky Voice's voice was _not_ coming from the indefinite ether inside her head, and two, the bones were moving.

She dived into the grass next to Soul and shoved him out of her way, poking her head up just enough to peer across the road at the bones. "Fucking Nimue and nightshade," he cursed, patting around for his hat and looking an inch away from bolting. At least she assumed it was a curse. "Lancelot's saggy left-"

"It's the skull," she spat, ducking back down and scuttling over to jab him in the chest. "Is this one of your weird fairy things?"

"No," he growled, finally rediscovering his hat and clutching it to his heart. "All I can do is make fire. That's _it_, okay? I can't do anything else, especially not necromancy, there's only like twenty people who-" He stopped then, with a rather peculiar expression, and stuck his freshly hatted head up from the grass. Maka suppressed a scream, tried not to wonder if her diseased brain was actually leaking out her ears, and followed suit, adrenaline buzzing in her veins.

The skeleton was chattering gently, a macabre windchime, as it rose and joined together in a nauseating parody of life. It was a deer, Maka thought hazily, prying Soul's white-knuckled grip off her forearm. His hands were cold, and touching him made her vaguely uneasy, as if she'd stuck her arm in a dark space and brushed against something soft and wet.

"Ah, almost!" mumbled the deer, giving its newly assembled body a clattering shake; Soul and Maka both jumped as it lifted its skull and made a motion as if it were looking around. "Hello there? Anybody? Hello?" There were leathery shreds of hide still clinging to the spine and legs, and scarlet-stained strips of velvet still furring the antlers. When the deer took an experimental step forward, Soul dug his fingers into her arm again. He had very large hands, she noticed, with long, slim, almost girlish fingers and nails bitten down to the quick.

"We need to go," he whispered sharply, pulling.

She didn't argue, and she didn't tell him her ridiculous, improbable recognition of the voice inside her head. They stayed crouched in the tall grass and darted away from the deer-thing, towards the city, both of them wondering silently what the hell they were getting into.

* * *

Albarn looked calm enough, if still a bit too wild-eyed, white showing all around the green like a nervous horse, but Soul felt much less controlled.

Titania had sent someone after him, he was sure, a very powerful necromancer, and he could still hear the rattling of those cursed bones. How had the necromancer found him? Did he have some sort of tracking spell on him, or was it luck- or was he simply the only thing with magic left in the human world? Those questions and more were chasing each other in nervous circles around his head, and each step closer to the city made it worse. The sun had melted away the fog, and the stark light made everything less tolerable, too real.

In fact, he was so stuck in his frantic thoughts that he almost didn't notice their official entrance into the city, until Albarn paused with a scrape of boots.

'Welcome to Sodoma, Population 731,548' read the battered metal sign. Soul stretched out a hand to it absently, just to feel the _absence _of pain at the touch of steel.

In tiny, spiky, worn black letters, someone had scrawled beneath the welcome, 'beware the angels. their wings don't melt in the fire.'

"Hell," said Albarn, sounding disgruntled, her thumbnail scratching softly over the handle of that damned knife. "What is _with _all these creepy omens? Can't the universe send, like, puppies for once?"

"It's punishment," he almost told her. Instead he shrugged, grunted, and swallowed the guilty words, staring ahead at the black road, nearly covered in rubble and swallowed up by the sun-baked depths of the silent city.

Albarn, still standing by the sign, inhaled sharply. He glanced over his shoulder at her; she was on her tippytoes, reaching a hand towards the graffiti.

"What?" he asked warily, struck by the anguished twist of her mouth.

"I thought I recognized the handwriting," she sighed, rubbing her temples. "Never mind. I keep hoping- listen, we're looking for a redheaded man, all right?"

"And puppies," he said weakly. "Got it."

* * *

have you guessed who silky voice and rough voice are yet? :) hint: one is a main soul eater canon character who hasn't shown up by name yet; one is a side character whose face we only see, like, twice or something. Also, sodoma is another version of 'sodom' as in sodom and gomorra. It's just a fictional city, it's not like intended to be Sodoma, California or anything. Things are movin along now, and I've got some fun stuff planned for the city. soul and maka are NOT gonna be happy, haha. Short chapter again, SORRY. Anyway, lemme know what you think! And again, this is a VERY LOOSE interpretation if hamlet- me being me, shit's gonna be way out of order and stuff.

thanks for reading. :) -RDH


	4. Chapter 4

Maka was halfway through the large, empty doorway when Soul stepped on her heel and sent her stumbling to one knee on the concrete. "Ow!" she protested. "Watch it!"

"Sorry," he mumbled, still impatiently crowding her as she scrambled up, glancing over his shoulder towards the street. The city was set up much like Gethsemane, broad flat avenues in a sort of grid, surrounding squarish groups of buildings. But Gethsemane had laughter, people, and bustling streets. This place had wailing wind and glassy-eyed, slinking dogs; Maka had nothing but a skinned knee and an annoyingly paranoid, supernatural shadow.

"You're making _me_ paranoid, birdbrain," she hissed, trying to puff up and aiming her elbows at him threateningly. "Back off a little or I'll _make _you."

"So aggressive," he said distractedly. He sneered in her general direction and tugged at the edge of his hat, which was drooping more forlornly by the hour. "This whole place feels weird. It feels wrong. It's like- it feels like- a graveyard that nobody visits anymore?"

She hummed thoughtfully. "Do fairies have graveyards?" A silly distraction, and she knew it, but she asked anyway.

"I'm not gonna tell you how to kill me!"

Good lord. "That's totally not what I meant, you idiot." Paranoia was catching, apparently. She hid a chuckle behind the swing of her hair.

"I- yes, we do. And shut up."

Maka ground her teeth and scrambled over another piece of rubble. They were on the ground floor of a building's stone and steel shell. It was lit well enough by sunlight, since most of the interior walls were totally gone. It was like the weird skeleton of an artificial cave, and she found herself glancing upwards uneasily more than once at the looming weight of the structure that remained. Once, it had had many floors, forty or maybe more, but now it was a blown-out husk. Some of the other structures were of sturdier build, though, and had held up better. Maka had even seen one storefront still displaying tattered rags that had been clothes. Of course, merchants and scavengers like her father had surely already picked through the buildings near the periphery of the city, but it was very, very large indeed, almost unimaginably so, and the thought of what might still lie within had Maka practically vibrating with curiosity.

_Maybe I'll find a library, with lost technology, and I can get rid of you freeloading jerks_, she thought at the voices, aware of the manic edge to her mood but not caring enough to fight it. It drowned out the sadness and fear for a moment, anyway, though she became suddenly aware of how much her jaw ached; she'd been grinding her teeth again. The city held beautiful secrets, but it also held the ghosts of thousands, and she knew if she let herself really _think _about that, about how many had died here, she would fall apart. She would begin to imagine them all the way she imagined the characters in her books, as full people who had looked up at the stars and wished and made mistakes, and loved and hated, and been loved and hated. The empathy would break her.

"Soooo, who's the red haired man?" Soul asked after a little while, still tagging along right at her heels. He said it softly, like he knew it might bother her, and she was quietly grateful. "Albarn. Hey, Albarn-"

"I _heard _you." She sighed heavily, trying to breathe the harp music out of her pounding head. Should she tell him? Her instincts, ever distrustful, said 'no' but her mind said 'why not, birdbrain's harmless, if too flammable'.

"... _soon, I think I've refined the tracking, if not the sensory… charms, you know," _said Silky Voice.

Anyway, she sort of _wanted _to talk about Spirit, even if it was to someone who didn't know him. She had forgotten so many tiny details about her mother over the years, as Kami's absences became longer and longer; a tiny voice in the back of her mind kept whispering that she'd better study up on Spirit now, because she might never see him again. "It's my father. He's missing. He's kind of an explorer, but he didn't come back from his last trip." Her voice was annoyingly tight with unexpected tears, and she cleared her throat twice, staring at her feet as they moved steadily over the shattered ground.

"_Oh, _shit." Soul actually fell a few steps behind her, apparently recalibrating something in his brain, because when he caught back up, he actually tried to give her a hand over another piece of rubble. She didn't take it, of course, but she managed a stiff nod of thanks, which seemed to appease him. He wasn't terrible company, really, when he wasn't asking ten thousand questions and making her question her sanity even _more. _"So you're on a rescue mission. Huh. And your Geth-whatever place must be pretty much the _only _place humans live for a long ways, huh?"

"Yep," she said shortly, trying not to bristle. After all, she'd volunteered the information for some unknown reason.

Tsu had always said laughingly that Maka wasn't much good at idle chit-chat; she liked to get to the heart of things, the facts or the planning or the interesting details. "For a girl who reads fairy tales all the time, you're practical to a fault," she liked to tease, with a sweet little smile to let Maka know it was meant with love. She blinked hard again; she _missed _her best friend Tsubaki, achingly and deeply. Now that she'd made it to the city, every possible outcome felt ominously imminent and immediate, and she was afraid.

"We spent a lotta time just wandering around, though, trying to get across the river," Soul pointed out. Maka jumped.

"_...another try, so soon? You need…" _said Rough Voice, as the harp gave a discordant moan and stopped.

"Yep!" she barked, trying to untwist her face out of its scowl. If she wasn't careful it'd stick.

"_...something, I know… try again, I have to," _said Silky Voice. He sounded exhausted, she thought, and maybe on the verge of tears, a lot like she did at the moment. Was it wrong to get attached to the voices in her head, to worry about them, to give them nicknames? Was she making it worse? Maybe she'd been insane her whole life, and just never _realized. _Maybe she'd hidden it behind excuses like 'imaginative' and 'short-tempered' and 'bookworm' when really she was just defective. After all, she hadn't been able to keep Kami around, and now she couldn't even rescue her own father.

Soul lagged behind again, then actually took his hat off for a moment to twist between his hands. She stole a glance at his freckled ears; they were wriggling, which made pieces of his hair flap. It was sort of hilarious; maybe that was the reason for the _hat_. "Shit. Sorry. I'm, uh, I didn't- rescuing someone's a lot less dastardly than I was thinking, or whatever."

"What, you thought I was some kind of bad guy? A criminal?" She started resignedly towards another doorway, on the other side of the massive building's ground floor.

"... _thank_…. _my brother," _said Rough Voice.

"Nooo," he said unconvincingly.

"That's kind of ironic," she mumbled. "I thought you were a bad guy." What with the teeth, the fire, and the _raw _meat.

"Past tense is hopeful, I guess," he mumbled back.

The re-emerged into the sunlit street, boots crunching on a glittering carpet of grabel and crystalline glass, and Maka had to shield her watering eyes. There were flowering vines and ivy winding up the corners of all the buildings, and a few orange-eyed pigeons were watching them shiftily from the rusted, overgrown wreck of something she suspected was called a 'truck'. Tiny, white and blue butterflies were fluttering delicately all around.

"It's so pretty-"-" Maka said, agape.

Soul gave a gurgling, "Wa-_haaa!_" and then tackled her at the knees. She went down into the tall weeds behind the rusted wreck with a squeak and half a scream- half, because Soul clapped his chilly palm over her mouth and put a finger over his own lips, kneeling next to her. He'd seen something she hadn't.

Heart pounding, she yanked her face away from his hand and raised her eyebrows in question, trying hard to keep it together. Her _mother_ wouldn't be this afraid.

"There," he mouthed silently, pointing.

It wasn't a monster. The deer-skeleton was back, or rather, whatever had been possessing it. This time the bones in terrible motion were from some kind of canine, maybe a relative of those wolves that had been so hungry, and the long, clicking teeth glinted like pearls in the sunshine. The skull was looking all about, almost dizzily, as the skeleton took a wobbly step.

Maka ducked down more completely behind the wreck and allowed herself one brief moment of panic. Soul was staring at her with wide eyes.

"Do you know anything about this?" she breathed. "Ways to kill it? Will your fire help?" She had a feeling that just running over and kicking the bones wouldn't do much, thought it was tempting.

He looked three times as panicked as she felt, which was saying something, but then took a deep breath and rallied, much to Maka's relief. "Um- um- necromancy is a natural magic, so we need, uh, artificial reagents to interrupt the equilibrium- what do you have?"

"Nothing," she hissed, trying to infuse as much motivating venom into her whisper as was possible.

"I mean- in your pack-thingy, do you have any cooking spices? Herbs?"

Maka blinked. "Salt and pepper?"

He wrinkled his nose and chanced another glance over the top of the rusty metal heap. "Fuck. Anything else? Start listing stuff."

The skeleton shook itself; they both twitched.

When it spoke, it was again in Silky Voice's smooth, polished tones, and Maka flinched hard as she opened the buckle on her pack with shaking hands. "Hello?" called the skeleton. "Hello? Is anybody there? Anyone? Gawaine's rusty codpiece, where the hell did I end up this time!" Then it gave itself another rattling shake and started trotting slowly away from them, down the street, criss-crossing back and forth and poking its bony nose into odd corners, calling at intervals, "Hello? Hellooo-ooo!"

Its jaw did not move when it spoke, Maka noticed. Instead the familiar, genteel tones seemed to come from nowhere, reaching her ears from another dimension but no discernible direction, confusing her senses; she was shivering more and more with each passing second.

_Don't be a superstitious ninny_, she told herself fiercely. _Buck up. Be an Albarn woman. Try and ignore the fact you're fighting a bunch of bones with a freaking fairy- _

Soul upended her pack entirely and shook it out when she wasn't fast enough. Clothes and equipment tumbled out, and he dug through it frantically, spitting very quiet curses. "Cotton- what is this? Steel? No good- salt won't help- wait- what's this in the bottle?"

"Aspirin?" she said quizzically. Not that it had _helped _much with the pounding migraines that had preceded the voices. "No, don't you dare, do you know how much that _cost_ me?"

"I remember money," he whispered, dodging her fist distractedly and rapidly grinding her eight precious aspirin into dust between two rocks, then scraping it all into one palm. His fingertips were sending out intermittent sparks. His eyes were very wide, and he'd sweated through his shirt. "My culture's economy is based on trading- here, okay, I'm going. Okay, okay, don't die, Soul, don't die-"-"

"_What_?" was all she got out before Soul darted out from behind the wreck and sprinted towards the wandering skeleton with a screech that she was pretty sure he meant as a warrior yell. "Holy shit!" she shouted, yanking Tsu's knife out of her boot and barrelling after him.

"Don't die don't die don't _die,"_ he shrieked, one long breathless shout of high-pitched fear; the skeleton wheeled towards him with surprising agility. He tossed the powdered aspirin straight at the empty sockets, then ran full-tilt away and dived behind the corner of a shop.

The aspirin exploded in a puff of white, and the dust-cloud gave off sparkling blue glimmers that Maka was _sure _aspirin did not usually do. Maka skidded to a stop, ramming her nose on Soul's shoulder as she bounced off him and nearly stabbing him in the kidney, and screeched, "What are you doing?!"

"_Soul, _what-" said the skeleton, and then the bones shuddered and collapsed.

Soul made another ridiculous whimpering sound and sank to the ground, panting and scrubbing his fingers through his hair beneath his hat. "Oh my _Merlin_!"

"It knew your name!" Maka barked, edging up to the bones and poking them with her toe. "Wanna explain that, birdbrain?"

He shook his head even as he answered, and she saw him go pale beneath the surreal glimmer of his skin. "I know the necromancer who's been tracking me," he admitted, sounding upset. She briefly considered patting him on the shoulder or something. "I mean, I didn't _know_ I know him until I'd already broken the possession. But that's Kid. Uh, one of Titania's advisors officially, but he helps- he's my friend. I didn't think he'd look for me." It had an air of confession about it, almost, as if he were sharing a secret. The powdered aspirin was still on his hands, bitter and white.

Maka bit her tongue hard enough to hurt. He had someone looking for him, just like her father, and for some reason it made him seem more like a whole, real person to her. She sat down with a thump and put her fists on her temples. "No. You're lying." Should she tell him she recognized the voice? Could he help her in some way? She didn't _know, _she had no idea what to do, because everything happening was impossible and her life and her emotions were upside down and inside out. Her instinct when dealing with people was always to retain as much information as possible, to keep her hand hidden, as it were; she felt more secure when she had the upper ground. Tsubaki could tell her it was because of some deep-rooted fear of being left till she was blue in the face, but knowing the _why _didn't make it any easier for Maka to change.

"What? No I'm not. That's how he knew my name- he musta been looking for me." Soul looked ridiculously pleased at this.

"That voice- that voice-"-" She couldn't finish the sentence. Instead she pressed hard on her head with her fists, as hard as she could, trying to squeeze it back into working order- then stood up with a grunt. "Nothing. Um, let's just- that was all my aspirin, so do we need to find something else?"

"What, to get rid of Kid? No. I hope he comes back, actually, he can probably help me get home. Fuck, now I feel bad, he's gonna have a killer headache."

The voice who'd been giving her migraines for months would have a headache from her weaponized aspirin- it was the _definition _of irony. "At least things are going right for one of us," she mumbled, feeling guilty about her omission. Still- she couldn't quite bring herself to explain it. The coincidences were too much, too many, that she should somehow run into a _fairy_ who was acquainted with the otherwordly voices that had been torturing her- it was impossible. There _had _to be some sort of explanation, and she would find it herself. If she told him, Soul would stop asking her questions, stop keeping her company on this weird quest, and who knew what vindictive fairy curse he might hit her with? "Let's hang on to this."

He followed her, as usual. "The _skull?_ Gross."

"It's like a zillion years old! Look, it's just bone. And dirt. And this way it won't matter if there's something around for your friend to- possess, or not."

Soul pinched the bridge of his nose. "Fine, yeah, okay, that makes sense. Here, I'll carry it."

Maka said bemusedly, "Wait, really?"

"Yeah. It's a good idea."

Huh. _He took my advice, just like that_, she thought. "That was cool, though, the aspirin thing," she offered, trying to be fair.

He seemed embarrassed as he poked the sharp teeth of the skull experimentally, looking both intrigued and disgusted. "Listen, I kinda recognize this part." He twirled one finger in a circle at their surroundings. "I wandered through here, I think. I can, uh, I was sleeping in a building over that way, in the second level. It's safe. The door locks and everything. And there's some cool stuff there I found…"

"Let's go," she said immediately, trying on a smile. If he took her advice, she could take his, and maybe they'd help each other out a little before he went back to his creepy fairy dimension. It would be a small bright spot, or something; wasn't that what an eternal optimist like Tsu would say? Anyway, she needed a base of operations so she could set up a proper search grid for her father. This place was so big that if she didn't stay organized, she didn't even have a hope of finding him.

Soul smiled back crookedly, and his teeth were as long as the skull's. "I guess we're in this together or whatever, whether we like it or not, huh?"

"Yep," she said, amused and deciding to _enjoy _being so, for once. "Yeah, that's about it." The shattered glass and the few whole windows that remained were reflecting all the bright sunlight right into her eyes; she had to put up one hand.

"You should make a _hat_," Soul said reprovingly, motioning at her shielding fingers, and much to her own surprise, she burst out laughing and nearly dropped Tsu's knife.

* * *

So Silver-Claw Albarn had _two _kinds of laughs, Soul thought, bemused: a creepy insane one way too much like Queen Titania's and a nice, light one, like spring rain on a rooftop. It was the sound most like the birdsong at home he'd heard since getting here.

"Oh. The, uh, place I was staying is leaky," he told her, remembering. He'd been rudely woken on his third night in the human world, after he'd _finally _felt somewhat safe, by icy water on his nose. "Is the laughing a human thing?"

She looked suspicious. "What?"

"Nothing." He was pretty sure he only had one kind of laugh, and he hadn't had much occasion to use it lately. "Know any jokes?"

He asked because it was both boring and scary, creeping through the mournful husk of a place that had once held more humans than there had _ever_ been fairies. The sheer size of this place had stunned him when he'd gotten a grasp on the scope of it, the fact that _every _building was full of countless rooms, all for holding humans. It was like a beehive, each cell made for each worker, and they'd all coursed through the chilly stone streets of the city in one great mass, but now they were gone. It was _really_ freaking creepy, especially since now he knew there were _things_ around that wanted to eat Albarn and possibly him too, and a joke sounded nice. He was trying hard not to jump at every pigeon and lizard, and he was trying hard not to be resentful towards her for dragging him back to this place.

Yeah, he knew he would have had to anyway to get home, and that it would have been worse alone, and that she hadn't _meant _to do anything but save his life and her father, but it was still annoying.

She laughed again, the silver knife glinting in her hand. It surprised him when she said, "Knock, knock."

He tried to read her face, but there was only dirt (again, and prominent) and a faint tinge of mischievousness. "It's… someone at the door?" he tried politely. It must be another weird human thing, the terrible sense of humor. Come to think of it, he remembered the blue-haired boy being fond of hideous puns.

"Nooo. I say 'knock, knock' and you ask who's there, and the answer is what's funny," she explained patiently, hopping over a gigantic iron beam that had peeled away from the shop on their right. It still had shreds of a cheerful red-and-white striped awning on the front facade.

"Oh." Odd, but he could play along. What else was there to do? "Okay, do it again."

"Knock knock!"

"Kneel before your immortal queen, shed your wings and the scales from your eyes in fear at her might, and state your name if you dare," he rattled off quickly, waiting for the humor.

Albarn paused to stare at him, bug-eyed. "Holy hell, where are you _from? _Even my psycho uncle isn't that bad!"

"I told you already!" he snapped, miffed. Every pageboy at Titania's court knew how to properly answer a knock, and if they didn't she _taught _them, emphatically.

"Yeah, but-" She shook her head, and her ridiculous pigtails flapped like wings. And she called _him _a birdbrain. It was rude, just rude, and he'd even saved her life not three hours ago- not that Kid would've hurt her, but he _could _have been a threat. "What's it like_?" _she asked finally.

Soul opened his mouth to bark something sarcastic, but then she poked his arm with one finger. When he glanced at her, she looked so eager, so earnest, like everything was dark and she was waiting for the sun to come up, that he finally realized she was curious. She was just as interested by his world as he was by hers- and she'd been putting up with his endless questions for days now, and hadn't said a word.

"Um," he said, trying to figure out how to explain a place he'd always taken for granted, seeing as he'd lived there for his whole life, except for that brief eight-month exile to the human world when he was nine. "It's big. Our planet's actually a little larger than yours, I think." Kid's skull- gross, rephrase, the skull Kid was _using_\- was smooth under his fingertips. He tried to remember the things he and Wes had learned from Kid, ecology and natural history and the like. Albarn seemed to like nature, which was a very respectable, fairy-like trait; he'd noticed she was always turning over rocks and poking plants and things. Too bad she couldn't find him an _acceptable_ feather for his poor hat. "One sun, two moons. It's supposed to be some kind of semi-mirror of your solar system, but I don't really get all the-" He waved a hand. "Temporal-displacement, eighth dimension stuff. We've got stars like the ones here-"

"Do you name them?" she blurted, sounding almost rabid. "The shapes?"

"Constellations. Yes," he told her, feeling a little smug. It was nice to have the conversational power, for once.

"Do you have any fairy books with you, by chance?" she persisted, still with the extra-insane glint in her eye. They were pushing through thick clumps of vegetation now as the streets narrowed, mostly thorny blackberries and low, lush ferns. She'd gotten a leaf stuck in her bangs.

He didn't tell her. This time, his own laughter surprised him. Kid liked books, too. "No, sorry, I got dumped here sort of unexpectedly."

She raisd a brow. "By your Queen. Who you sort of… work for? And who can apparently throw people across dimensions if they annoy her, rather than just-"-" She drew a finger across her throat and made a hilarious choking gargle.

This girl was _smart_. And she listened, apparently, and remembered everything. "Er," he said dubiously, taken aback. "Um. Yes, but it's a bit more complicated than that. It's not every fairy who can cross over. She just did it to _me _because I was already tainted."

Albarn frowned, but she didn't let the big blackberry vine she was pushing out of the way snap back to whip him in the face, which was nice. "I resent the implication that my world is a _taint_."

"It is to fairies," he said mulishly. "Your world's full of _iron _and electricity_, _and up until, like, three years ago, that shit burned us right up. Okay?"

She sent a pointed glance at the skull. "Well, your world has creepy necromancers who take all my expensive aspirin, and ugly hats, so I guess we're even!"

"It's ugly because I lost my harpy feather!" he shouted.

"Harpies _are _ugly, every book on mythology I've ever read says that, it's a fact!" she shouted back.

"They are not!" he snapped, horribly offended. "My feather was a gift from a harpy, and she's very nice!"

Albarn paused with her mouth open as if she was about to shout something else, then her eyebrows twitched. "She?"

"Don't say it like that, I'm not into feathery chicks," he groaned, pulling his hat down tighter and reminding his ears not to wriggle. "It's right after this corner."

She snickered, pushing easily through the undergrowth and managing to miss the thorns that grabbed at _him _and his poor coat_. _ "Yeah, whatever. Aren't fairies supposed to have wings, anyway? And you mentioned wings earlier."

He rolled his eyes. "Don't believe everything you read in those books. Like I said, not a lot of fairies have been able to cross over, and generally they're kind of-"

"Weird?" she supplied, voice slightly high-pitched.

"Shut _up! _Just don't leave bread and milk out for me on your doorstep or anything, okay?"

She didn't answer, and he turned to see her leaning with one arm on the mossy brick wall, eyes squinched close and teeth digging into her lower lip. She was shaking from head to toe.

"Albarn?" he tried uneasily. Finally he took a cue from _her_, earlier, and poked her in the arm with one finger. "Hey, you okay? There's totally nowhere to bury you in this place and I'm not dragging you all the way to diggable dirt if you die-"

She laughed, a little choked, and hit him with two bright slits of pained green. "You're a jackass. I'm okay, it'll pass, it's just- it happens sometimes."

"Headaches?"

"Kinda."

Well, that was evasive. And he'd just smooshed her aspirin, which made him feel guilty again. She blew out a slow breath and started walking, boots crunching competently on dry leaves. "It's right over there. That building," he said, pointing, as they exited the alley and rounded the corner.

"Oh," she said, stopping to survey carefully. "That one's way less fallen apart."

"Yeah. That's why I holed up there."

"Plus a locking door. That'll be nice," she said thoughtfully, only a trace of tightness in her voice as she massaged her temples. "It's so weird, the stuff that's lasted and the stuff that hasn't…"

"Yeah. Why haven't we seen any, uh, monster-y things like you were saying?" he asked. It was sort of nice, finally feeling able to ask questions about _important_ things without feeling like she was a heartbeat away from tearing his throat out.

She only shrugged, though, and sent a cautious glance back down the alley, which was not at all reassuring. "I have no idea. Maybe they're hunting somewhere else. Maybe they don't wanna come around a fairy. Maybe my name precedes me. No idea."

It was a smaller building than many they'd seen, square and squat, which was maybe why it hadn't totally collapsed under the weather and time. It was made of fat bricks, four stories, with a small, cracked blue door hanging off its hinges next to a giant empty space, presumably once a window. The ivy that was doing so well all around the city was doing _very_, very well indeed on this particular building, so much so that little of the original dirty-white paint was visible. Instead it was furred in wild, curling green. It was the reason he'd chosen it as a hidey-hole, really. The decrepit beauty of it had reminded him of home.

"It's _beautiful_, all that ivy," Albarn breathed. He nearly fell flat on his face, and for a moment he wondered sickly if she was some kind of mind-reader. There were probably limits to what he should tell her about his world, because soon he would be leaving to go back home- "You okay?" she asked.

He hastily rearranged his face to hide the fear. He wanted so, so badly to return home, to see his brother and Kid, and yet the thought of what Titania would do to him- "Yeah, come on, there's stairs inside."

"Yay, ancient stairs that we can fall to our deaths down," she mumbled.

"You're a pessimist, aren't you," he observed dryly.

* * *

yayyy, another chapter! kinda short, sorry, but now you know who one of the voices is :) i just had to do a skull joke, i'm sorry. you know the whole 'ah, yorick, i knew him well' joke while a guys holding a skull? that's from hamlet. so kid is now going to spend a lot of this story speaking from a skull. :)

it's funny to me, anyway, lol. thanks for reading, guys! i really appreciate all the reviews! especially the reviews from those of you who aren't familiar with hamlet, but still like this story- it's cool that it's still interesting enough for you guys. :) so thanks! next chapter: THE FATHER-GHOST APPEARS! /drumroll (plus more explanation about things, now that Soul and Maka have gotten over themselves a little and trust each other enough to at least hold a conversation)

(i know that's, like, the first 5 seconds of the Hamlet play, but I'm rearranging things)

-RDH


	5. Chapter 5

Bird brain's little hideaway above the shop was, to say the least, not at all what Maka'd expected.

"How long did you say you stayed here?" she asked faintly, doing a three-sixty spin to take it all in as Soul locked the door, hinges squealing, then slid the rusted old deadbolt home with a reassuring thunk.

He looked at her shiftily, then shoved his hands in his pockets and stared at his feet. "A month, I think. Or at least two weeks? A while. I didn't, um, really- I didn't go far from here, and then I found the map, and I thought maybe-"

"A _map_," she yelped, resisting the urge to shake him, but only by a hair. "You've got a map of the city and you didn't tell me?"

"I just _did_ tell you," he said mulishly, hat wriggling along with his ears. "I told you I had a bunch of stuff here that I found, and I thought the map'd help you search."

It would. It would be a _huge_ help, in fact, and it would keep her from wasting time. "Thanks," she mumbled. "But you still could have _told _me earlier. Specifically, about the map. With your words. You know?"

He shrugged and toed off his shoes, then hung his jacket carefully on the doorknob. It was an unexpectedly careful, neat motion performed like a habit, and he lined his shoes up beside the door too before turning to face her with raised brows. "So, uh, I'd offer you a drink but I literally have nothing. Also, now you're looking at me with that _face _again."

"_Two-faced, lying, treacherous snake-_" said Rough Voice, angry and dark.

"What face?" she said indignantly. He'd had the whole city to choose from, and surely there were other buildings that were secure, larger, nicer ones, but he'd decided to close himself up in this tiny room because of… beautiful ivy? Or because he just wasn't used to having much? Did he feel safer with four sturdy walls closing in around him, the way she did back home when Asura's troops were stomping through the dusty streets?

"That- _that _face."

"Well, it's weird that you have manners. Nobody offers drinks where I come from." She let her pack drop, did another spin, slower, and her feet kicked motes of glittering dust up into the syrupy gold light filtering through the window's filth. It was dirty, but the glass was still whole, lacey around the edges with shadowed silhouettes of ivy. The room was smallish, square, had obviously been cleaned well, and the floor was made of some chilly, smooth, patterned material. The walls were painted yellowed ivory, and the gigantic heap of quilts and blankets piled beside the window were every color imaginable, a soft, riotous rainbow. He'd found shelves somewhere, or maybe they'd been in the room all along; now they were draped in colorful cloth and groaning beneath the weight of a thousand mysterious _things_, things from a dead world.

"What?" he said uneasily.

Maka blinked, then shrugged a little, wondering when he would stop constantly trying to figure out what she was thinking. The poor bird brain had no idea what he was getting into with that one. "It feels like a museum."

"_... never going to happen, never," _snarled Rough Voice. She cringed.

"_Says you of little faith,_" retorted Silky Voice- Kid the necromancer, rather, but she secretly liked her original name for him better.

"A what?"

"It's- they used to keep things, old things from history, in one big building. So people could come learn from them."

"_Oh. _That, I like." He looked like he meant it, too, and his hat shifted as his ears twitched again. "I just collected things and brought them here. Something to do."

"What did you eat?"

He made a face. "Rats. Pigeons. A dog, once. Don't look at me like that, I _hated _it. They attacked me first, though. If you go out alone you'll wanna watch out for them. There's a pack around here that are pretty mean. And I made a rain catcher on the roof."

Resourceful, and apparently deceptively hardcore; her respect for him rose. "That explains why you're so skinny," she muttered, wrinkling her nose. "Rats. Ew!"

"I didn't exactly enjoy it," he snapped, shoving past her to set the skull carefully on one of the shelves, between a stack of yellowing photographs and some empty, oddly-shaped bottles of scintillating glass, amber and purple and green. They threw cheerful gleams of colored light against the walls and ceiling. Maka took her boots off, put them neatly beside his shoes on a whim, and took the photographs with her as she settled down on the edge of the quilt-pile.

"These are _really _nice," she said, petting one of the blankets. It had an odd, chemical smell lingering on it, but the stitches were perfect, artificially uniform and beautiful. No human could sew that well, not even Tsubaki. The colors were still vivid, too, impossibly bright violets and blues twining together like the oceans she'd read about.

She resolved quietly to bring one back for Tsu, and she wondered why her mother had never brought home anything so lovely for her daughter.

"_... always, always it's her, and this time she's gone too far with the… done enough to the humans, but no, Titania's never..." _said Rough Voice, accompanied by the sound of something shattering. Someone else besides her was having a bad day, apparently. The thought cheered her up a bit, actually.

"They were in the back of a big store, in these really thick, clear, bag things," Soul told her. His hat was wriggling again. Did his ears move to his mood, like an animal's? "I guess it was air-tight or whatever, they lasted, so I grabbed a bunch. Gets kinda cold at night."

_Plastic_, she thought. Her mother had showed her that, brought little molded toys for her when she was younger, strange-smelling and brittle with the years. It was so hard to make nowadays that only the richest people could afford what plastic artifacts remained.

The photographs- there were still some floating around Gethsemane, here and there, and though they were mostly a curiosity, she knew what they were, and had collected a few of her own- dampened her moment of cheer. She looked at the faces of ghosts, of people in strange clothes in strange places, doing things she didn't understand, laughing and smiling at the unseen photographers.

"There were so many people back then," she whispered.

Soul made a soft, unhappy sound in the back of his throat, and Maka glanced up at him. "Do you know what happened?" he asked, leaning against one of the ivory walls. He looked like a weary statue, all tense and pale and gold in the room's strange glow, predatory eyes hidden in shadow. There was a smudge of pinkish light from one of the bottles splashed across his chest.

"To- what, humans? No. Nobody does. I mean, word of mouth, but not a lot of documentation survived all the fires and fighting." She got back up and returned the stack of pictures gently to the shelf, then started hunting for the map. She didn't want to look at all those dead faces anymore. It reminded her too much of the voices in her head. "Just, you know, things used to be really different, and then those creatures came from nowhere, and a lot of people died. Eventually we figured out about the water, and stuff, ways to fight them, but the more humans there are in one spot, the hungrier the monsters get. It lures them."

Which was part of why nobody spoke out about Asura's… population control. They knew _they _could be next, and deep down, they knew that for every person who died in Gethsemane, they were just a little safer. From _some _monsters, anyway. "It's kind of- back where I live, it's getting better. Less disease, better food, better buildings, all that. We're safer. But for a while there were so few of us left, I guess, it got really bad."

If Soul was a statue, he looked now as if he might crumble away. "Must've been hard for you."

Empathy; she was instantly wary. "It was before I was born. The monsters came a long time ago."

"Oh."

She found the map at last, and her mouth went dry as she unfolded it. The thick paper was sturdy, but old, and she was careful not to tear it. "This place's _so _big."

"Yeah." Clearly he was attempting to be sympathetic.

It did not help in the slightest. "I need- I can't- I'm _never _going to find him! In all this? He could be anywhere, he's been gone for _weeks, _fuck! Fuck! God, I can't- look at this!" She threw the map in a fit of panicked pique; it fluttered gently to the ground like a dying bird.

His hat was quivering in earnest now as he stared at her, wide-eyed, silvery lashes nearly glowing in the dim room, as long as a girl's. "Uh, Albarn, you're getting all- all screechy- don't throw that, listen, calm down, okay?"

She set down the smooth metal cylinder she'd grabbed from the shelves with a clank and a sound much closer to a sob than she'd have liked. She'd known, of course, how big the world outside Gethsemane was. She'd seen the storms boiling over the prairie from atop her apartment building, titanic black clouds miles wide, spitting lightning like the wrath of a god, yet still so far away as to look only like a smudge on the distant horizon. She'd gone on hunting trips, spent days and days drowning in the endless, grassy nothing, but clearly she hadn't truly understood how small she was within the scope of it all, how little she could do. Maybe she was an Albarn, but she was no Kami.

"Hell. Hell! Listen, Albarn-" The hat fell right off. He actually ignored it, frowning hard. "Look. You can either keep looking, or go home right now, and if you go home, that means you don't have any hope left, right? So do you? Or are you gonna give up?"

"_No,"_ she hissed, nettled. "Of course not."

"Okay, yeah, so then. You gotta look for him." He shrugged pragmatically, tattered shirt scraping on the rough wall. "No use freaking out about it, right? I mean, since you don't really have a choice. Maybe we'll get lucky."

_Luck is for the stupid and the foolish, _Kami had always said. Maka put a hand to her aching head. "We?"

"I still need to find a way home," he said grimly. "Kid'll be able to tell me what I need for the ritual, as soon as he's back in the, um, the skull. Man, I never realized how creepy necromancy is until now." _Ha, _she thought dourly. _Fairies are so unbelievably weird- and there's something I never expected to think._ "But I'm sure I'll have to find all kinds of shit I don't have here yet. So. Yeah. I figured I'd tag along while you do your thing."

"You _have _to, anyway," Maka pointed out, sniffling slyly. If his home was so messed up, why did he want to get back there so badly?

Then again, Gethsemane was currently being run by Asura, who enjoyed public executions the way she enjoyed the bookstore, and yet she wanted to go home too.

Soul politely ignored her stuffy nose. "Yeah, that too, until you do something stupid and I save _your _life, which shouldn't be long."

"Wait, you saved me from the- from your friend. Kid," she pointed out, making a face as she stared down at the stupid map, spread out on the floor where she'd dropped it. She left it for now, but began rummaging through all the crap on the shelf for a pencil or something, to mark the route they'd taken so far into the city. "Doesn't that count?"

That earned her half a toothy smile. "Nah. I mean, he wasn't a legit threat. We didn't know that, but, you know, intent matters in magic." The smile slid away. "I'm sure there'll be something that _really _wants to kill us real soon."

"Yay," she mumbled, only half listening. The silver cylinder was proving interesting, once she figured out how to pop the cap off. It had an acrid smell, it rattled when she shook it, and had a tiny white thing like a button on the top.

She pressed it half by accident, then whooped in surprise. Soul actually screamed, and then they both gaped at the splatter of vibrant red coating her fingers.

"It's _paint_," she squeaked. "Oh my god! We can mark where we've been, we can make sure we don't get lost, we can leave a _message_ for my dad! I can't believe I didn't think about that!"

Soul only nodded and muttered something, staring at the red on her hands.

"_...things are getting worse_," said Rough Voice, and the harp began its dirge again as her weary head started to spin.

* * *

Albarn used the red paint, early the next morning. She wrote her name on the wall of the building opposite the quilt room.

"That's it?" he said, squinting at the dripping carmine letters.

"Yep," she said staunchly, capping the can. He decided not to point out that she'd written her _whole _name. Maka Albarn; it fit her. It was spiky, guttural, a little unpleasant to say, but pretty written out.

She had the map out again. "So? Where to?" he asked.

The silver knife poked at a tangled cluster of streets several miles eastward. "There. Lots of big stores, but it's deep enough in the city that it might not have been totally scavenged. It's the kind of place he'd be looking for."

"Okay," he said.

She gave him yet _another _suspicious look for no reason- it seemed to be a hobby of hers- then folded the map back up briskly and shoved it in her back pocket. "Okay. And there's a park on our way back, it might have running water. I need a wash."

"Okay."

Suspicious look number eighty-million so far. "_Okay."_

"Okay! Let's go already, then!"

"Fine!" she snapped, stalking off with such emphatic force that her tangled pigtails bounced. He grinned to himself, stuck his hands in his pockets, and followed. It was a peaceful enough morning, he thought, mildly surprised to find himself content.

The city was pierced by quiet rays of light, shining through the trees and bushes and around the jagged corners of decaying skyscrapers, painting the cracked sidewalks with dappled silvery gleams. Birds were everywhere, screeching and twittering, and even if their song wasn't as lovely as the birdsong back home, it was still nice in a woodsy, natural sort of way. Two muddy feral dogs were curled up beneath the toppled metal remnants of something, eyeing Albarn carefully with dark, glinting eyes as she made her way past.

She grinned at them and gave a tiny finger-wave as she went.

Soul busied himself with the skull as they picked their way through the green-and-metal city. The teeth were smooth as glass, but the bone was porous and dry, and it was soothing to run his fingertips over first one then the other. Kid still hadn't returned, but it was only a matter of time, once he got his energy back.

He was, in fact, so focused on comparing the canine skull's dentition with his own that he ran right into Albarn's back when she paused.

Her hands were held out in front of her, shaking, and she was staring at the red still on them.

"Albarn?" he said uneasily, looking all around. They stood at the intersection between four streets, one of which was choked entirely with rubble and blackberries. The others were emptier, grassy and torn, but mostly clear. There was nothing around alive except for him and Albarn, and the rising wind, blowing through the skeleton of the city with a low, thrumming moan.

The birds- they were quiet. They had stopped singing.

The hair on the back of his neck stood up, and he edged a step closer to Albarn. "Hey. _Hey." _

"Something's coming," she whispered, her wide, watering green eyes still fixed on her hands.

He set down the skull and took the silver knife out of her belt without even asking, flinching from habit though it didn't burn his skin. He'd seen that thousand-yard stare before, the dilated pupils and the open mouth, a black hole of terror in a twisted face.

Albarn was having a vision. She didn't seem to know it, but she was deep in it, too deep to pull out, and whatever was closing in on them, he'd have to handle it himself. He wasn't all that surprised to realize his hands were shaking too. The wind rose to a howl, blowing his hat clean off, so strong that he staggered sideways a step, and the trees and bushes were swaying all around like tortured spirits. He spun, trying to keep an eye on all four of the open streets at once, panting now from the sheer force of his terror, the knife cool in his clenched hand.

Beside him, Albarn made a sound- a sound like dying things, like a mountain collapsing, like a black hole or Titania's many victims-

And the monster came.

He was stumbling backwards in a blind panic, clutching her elbow to drag her with him out of sheer instinct, the knife only barely held in his nerveless, drooping hand. The monster was big enough to tear through the thorny blackberries of the overgrown street without pause, big enough to shake the ground, and he wondered dimly how they hadn't noticed it coming. It had many eyes studding its leather hide, too many, hundreds, all bloodshot and ravenous, bulging with pain and primal hunger, and none at all were where its face should be. It had no obvious mouth that he could see, no nose or ears, but the long, segmented tail lashing about was tipped with something like a larger version of Albarn's silver-claw blade, and its feet left craters sizzling with venom with each step.

It screamed with each movement, soft and agonized, emotional and hopeless, the scream of a human.

"Manticore," he breathed, through the haze of dark fear clouding his mind, and then Albarn snatched her knife from his hand and dug the fingers of her other hand brutally into his hair, yanking his face around towards hers.

The bright green eyes were fierce and clear again, and her cheeks were flushed. "Can you work your magic aspirin shit on this thing?"

"No- no-" Not even Kid could take down a manticore. Titania set them onto her finest warriors for fun when she got bored.

"Then _run!" _she barked, baring all her teeth, and she grabbed his wrist before leaping into motion as the monster howled. Glass crunched beneath their feet like bones as they fled.

The manticore followed, crashing through anything and everything in its path, and Albarn threw a glance back at it before pulling him into a side street too narrow for it to follow. Its screams did, though, and Soul was staggering with fear and terror when Albarn stopped, halfway through the tight alley.

"It can't get us here- it won't fit- breathe, _breathe_," she ordered, hands rough on either side of his face. He was too full of adrenaline to wonder at the contact, at the way it grounded him, reassured him. "Breathe! Come on, bird brain!"

He did, finally, a great frantic gasp, and the manticore bellowed loud enough to send dust filtering down over both of them from the two old skyscrapers that formed the alley. It was clawing at alley's narrow opening, thrashing back and forth futilely, its many eyes all trained directly on them.

"It wants a face," Albarn cried out, and Soul leaped back as she collapsed to her knees, staring in traumatized dismay as she threw her head back and joined her scream to the manticore's. "It wants a _face!"_

He put his back to one of the buildings, feeling it shake beneath the manticore's assault, and covered his face with both hands.

After a long time, the monster had given up and left, and the wind had died down. The birdsong returned, and then Albarn's small, calloused hand was tugging lightly on the hem of his pants.

He slid down the wall to sit, because it was that or fall down, and she watched him with red-rimmed, teary eyes.

"My dad's with the fairies," she whispered, all ten nervous fingers covering her mouth like a cage. "I saw him. I heard his voice, like all the others, except _more_, I saw him, he's- he's there, somehow, in your world."

And the monsters from _his _world were here in hers, which was probably why he couldn't stop shaking.

"For someone who just had a vision you're fairly calm," he whispered back, trying to will away the frantic, terrorized adrenaline still tying his nauseated guts into knots.

Albarn frowned at him, stroking the hilt of her knife over and over with her thumb, the faintest rasping sound. "A _vision?"_

"You know, seeing or hearing things from far away, across dimensions. And the manticore," He forced himself back to his feet, wiping sweaty hands on his jacket. "I didn't know humans could have them, though."

The face she turned up to him was bloodless a ghost's, a ghoul's. "We've gotta get that skull. I'm going with you when you go back to your- home. I'm bringing my dad back here."

Soul stood there for a long, long moment, swaying like the trees while his heart tried to pound its way out of his chest. "What exactly did you see? Just, um, I'll know if it was real or not-"

She was picking fiercely at the red paint on her palms, shedding scarlet flakes onto the ground all around where she sat. Thorns and leaves crowned her tangled hair, and a paper-thin slash across one cheekbone was sprouting tiny, perfect beads of blood. "A woman with golden hair, and golden eyes, and clothes made of snakes and skin. People with wings, and people with crystals growing out of their skin. Animals- deformed animals, horses with fangs and birds with feather made of stone shards. And my father, somewhere underground, talking to a boy who looked like you. Rough Voice."

Soul grabbed her by the shoulders and hauled her upright. "_What? _What was his name?"

"I don't know- he's got white hair, and ears, and I didn't _know _it but he's been in my head for months," she screamed, knocking him aside with hands curled into claws as she slumped down against the mossy bricks, tears like diamonds pouring down her face and leaving tracks of fresh pink in all the dirt. "I thought I was going crazy, I thought I was losing my mind all this time, but it was a _person_, a fairy, and that necromancer was the other voice, and they've _got my father!"_

The silence, when she stopped shouting, was smothering, and Soul was half afraid she'd be able to hear every beat of his wildly pounding heart.

"At least you found him," he said at last. "And I know my brother's okay. I wasn't… I wasn't sure, if Titania'd gone after him too. She's the woman with golden eyes."

"The queen who banished you?"

"Yes."

She pushed the heels of her palms against her closed eyelids, then rose to her feet again. He thought dimly that it would not be surprising if she burst into flame.

"Man was lonely, and man was afraid, and man created god," she rasped, gaze fixed in the endless middle distance as her scarlet-stained fingers wove together. "Fairytales were always my religion- I always- I was... So what now? What the hell am I supposed to do now?"

He felt so bad for her, that she had nobody to ask but _him. _"I guess we get the skull, and go back to the quilt room," he said, after a long time.

She sighed as if she were exhaling her very soul. "And then I'll give you a knife of your own, to keep."

Her boots were quick and sure as she moved across the alley's shattered surface, past the destruction of her race, and Soul watched her stiff back as he followed, astonished at her strength. If she made it to his world, she would learn that it was the fairies who'd tried to steal the human dimension, tried to take it for good instead of stealing over every now and then, and she'd learn that their attempt had backfired, had apparently brought magic to the humans for the first time- magic with teeth and venom, magic like the manticore, magic like the monsters.

It hadn't bothered him so much until now, but she carried his brother's voice in her head, the brother who was imprisoned high in Titania's darkest tower, the brother only Kid had spoken to in a decade, the brother he loved and missed and had failed.

She was a human, but she reached across dimensions without ever knowing, she tore apart space and time in ways no fae sorcerer could do. What _was _she?

The skull was where he had left it, at the four-way intersection, and the manticore was nowhere to be seen.

* * *

Maka watched him scoop it up, watched him rub his thumb across the vicious, carnivorous teeth. His own sharp fangs gleam red and gold in the sunset light as he tilted his head back and sighed. She hadn't realized how late it was, how long they'd hidden in that alley from the manticore.

"We'd better catch something to eat soon," she said.

He cast her a wary glance. "I need a hat, too."

"Why? So you can hide your ears?"

The blush that spread across his shining skin was startling. "_No."_

"The woman with the snakes had ears like yours."

The blush disappeared beneath a moment of stark fear. "I just feel better with a hat on, okay?"

"Okay. Whatever, bird brain." She felt better with a book in her lap, with a locked door between her and the world, so who was she to judge?

The wild dogs watched them from the velvety shadows with glittering eyes as they made their way cautiously back to the quilt room, and the click of the deadbolt was like a coffin closing. She felt suddenly suffocated, inside the tiny, beautiful room with the strange, beautiful fairy boy and his red, red eyes, while the sunset bathed the dead city outside the filthy window in dying light.

"... _so long, and I can't help him, I don't know... to do! All her political bullshit, and nobody's come to help…" _barked Rough Voice, Soul's brother, sounding wearier than she'd ever heard him before, and the sound of his half-assed harp playing finally lulled her to sleep.

She woke before he did, and she crept out the door without waking him. He was sprawled on his back in his quilt-nest, snoring softly with an open mouth, and his multicolored coat blended in with the blankets' glorious rainbow medley.

She fumbled her way through the dark stairwell to the roof of the building, brushing past spiderwebs and breathing fragrant dust until she emerged into the bright, clear morning. There was a rusted water tower, toppled over and settled gently into flaky orange decay. An ugly blue tarp was spread out beside it, arranged by Soul to catch the rain. Half of the roof was perfectly intact, and half was crumbled away, jagged and broken at the edges. White birds were cooing softly among the scattered bricks, and they didn't seem to mind her presence as she perched on the thick stone ledge the bordered the roof. The sun painted the clouds in a hundred colors, and she tried to pretend they didn't make her think of _blood, _and her father's matted hair.

That vision- the blackness spreading like mold across her sight, the dizzy airlessness, the agonizing tearing sensation in her brain, her flesh, her bones- it was so terrible to remember that she could only pray it never happened again, though she'd found her father through it.

It was still chilly from the night on the roof, but she was hot and fearful, feverish with terror.

Her mind was all she had, her most potent weapon, yet something within it was changing, and she didn't understand what. She only knew that Spirit was the captive of a monstrous _thing_, a woman with a forked silver tongue and beautiful, icy eyes the color of lightning and fireflies- and she knew she had to go there, to save him from a world she didn't understand.

Worst of all, she wanted her mother. The thought had her pressing cold scabbed fingertips to her cheeks, wiping away the tears.

"I made coffee," Soul said quietly, standing at the dented metal door that led to the rooftop.

She didn't turn around until she knew for sure her face was dry. "You've had coffee all this time and you didn't tell me? There's a limit to what I can forgive, bird brain."

He was smiling crookedly, just a little, when he came over and pushed a steaming mug into her hands. "Only a bit, and it's probably older than both of us, so be warned." He sat next to her, though he kept his feet planted on the roof, rather than letting them dangle over the edge as hers did.

"How'd you heat it?" He raised a pale brow and snapped his fingers, letting swirling fire blossom richly around them, a bouquet for the devil. "Oh, right." Two bitter sips later, she said softly, "Are you sure you're on my side? Because I'll do anything I have to do to get my dad back, and I'll be fighting _your _people."

He considered the question carefully, holding his own mug in both hands and breathing in the fragrant steam. She was glad he was thinking about it so seriously.

"Well," he said at last. "I guess so. I've never really belonged there, either, so I may as well help you."

There was a _world _in that, but the tenseness of his shoulders and the way he swirled his coffee, staring into it like it might reveal something beautiful, told her not to pry.

"Okay," she said compliantly. "Good."

They drank their sour coffee as they watched the sun rise between the ragged teeth of the crumbling city. She watched his long fingers pick the flaking glaze of his cup, and she had a feeling he was watching her too when she turned her face away.

He looked _tired, _she thought. When she stood up to go back inside, he lifted his gaze to her face and asked, "Hey, Albarn. D'you think we have a chance?"

She was stunned and awed by the way he said 'we', by the way his declaration of alliance with a _human_ fell so naturally from his cracked lips.

"Yeah," she said at once. "Yeah, I do. Crazier things have happened. And I'll help Rough Vo- your brother."

He smiled again, lopsided and vaguely, darkly amused, and she felt suddenly that he understood her, that he knew the same self-loathing, too-empathetic, existential pain she quietly endured nine days out of ten.

"Cool," he muttered into the dregs of his coffee, long freckled ears twitching slightly in the sunshine.

"Cool," said Maka. The word was awkward, but her answering smile felt real.


	6. Chapter 6

_Stop it, _Soul begged. _Stop, don't hurt him, don't hurt him-_

Titania's spidery fingers flexed, and her eyes gleamed molten gold. Wes, the traitor, screamed, and the court watched with bared, glittering teeth, a single entity without bravery or mercy.

Her lips were pale and cruel, and when Soul lunged forward to bite her, her blood ran black.

* * *

"Soul? Wake up- Soul- _Soul!_"

Albarn was shouting, and shaking him. It was a long moment before he could move, before the tavening monsters in the darkness turned back to simple shadows.

"Sorry," he croaked at last, batting her hand away.

She scooted back immediately, retreating to her half of the quilt-nest, and he was grateful for the space even as he nearly drowned beneath a sudden wave of panicked loneliness. "Do you, uh, want to talk about… your brother?" He must have made a sound, because she added hastily, "Not to pry or whatever, just, you scream in your sleep. About him. And I sort of feel like I know him, since he's usually in my head giving me migraines lately."

"Sorry," he muttered again, scrubbing at his face.

"It's cool," she said quietly, shrugging one shoulder. He took a closer look at her, squinting through the starlit dim; even in the bluish night, the dark smudges beneath her eyes were visible.

"You look like shit," he said finally.

She snorted. "I had a nightmare too. And usually I write them down, and then I can go back to sleep, but that hasn't been working so well lately. No paper." A very pointed look was thrown his way. "I think maybe I'm getting them so much because my crazy is actually creepy fairy magic."

"Er," said Soul guiltily. "Well. What was your nightmare about?"

She sighed and wriggled back down into her quilts, bangs sticking up messily in all different directions. "Do you really want to know?"

He hesitated, thrown by the faint, aching tremble of her voice. _Moonlight makes men mad_, Wes had always said, but right now Soul felt nothing but brutal fatigue and something like the too-loose tongue that came with a few glasses of wine: a bleary, sad yearning for confession and connection. She was nothing but a mop of tarnished gold and a succession of squeaky yawns right now, and the wind scouring through the empty city drowned out his still-pounding heart.

"Yeah," he said at last. Misery loved company, right? Maybe it would help her, too.

She took a deep breath, and when she started to talk, it was with the cadence of a natural storyteller, smooth and lovely, her feminine voice like silver bells against the backdrop of the wind. "I read this in a book, and I was thinking about it before I fell asleep, so I dreamed it. A long, long time ago, when humans were everywhere and there were no monsters, there was an accident. A 'meltdown'. Toxic poison got everywhere, and it was invisible. It was in the air, the water, the plants, the food, everything. It ate people up from the inside out, burned them slowly alive, and back then they didn't know why or how to stop it, so they sent in teams of people to help. One of those helpers, one of those men who went straight into danger that he couldn't even see, he had a family at home. A little boy." She shifted a little, and for a moment he caught a flash of lovely green. "They told the helpers not to take anything away from the accident, because the poison could be anywhere, on anything, and it didn't go away for years and years, but his son wanted a hat. He really, really wanted it, and the helper didn't think it could hurt, so he gave it- he gave it to his son, a poisoned hat, just one little hat. His son's brain got sick, and he... died. And then the father didn't want to talk about what had happened any more."

"That's a real shitty bedtime story to tell yourself, Albarn," Soul said hoarsely.

Her laughter startled him. "Yeah, I know. But you know, all those stories. All those things that happened, all of history, it's going away. It's being forgotten. All the work people did, all the great loves and the tragedies, and the _stories_, they're just disappearing, like they never happened at all. People didn't really care about rescuing books when the monsters first came, and everything was exploding, everyone who was even a little sick was dying. They needed to survive. I feel kind of… guilty, I guess, if I let myself forget too."

"But it did happen," Soul told her sleepily. "Right? I mean, it mattered to the _people _it happened to, back then. And isn't time an illusion anyway, or whatever? Kid always used to talk about that."

"More dimensional shit?"

"Ha. Yeah."

"So then that man's watching his son die, forever, all the time, right now in some other dimension."

"He's watching his kid get born. He's watching him learn to talk, and walk, right now."

She snorted softly. "I guess."

"You're a depressing chick, you know that?"

"Like you're _not?"_

"Whatever."

"Shut up, bird brain. Go to sleep."

He yawned so hard his jaw cracked, and he rolled over, closer to the window, so that the icy moonlight glowing through the grimy glass could bathe his face. "Tell me something that's not a huge downer, then, or I'll just have another nightmare and wake you up."

"I'm not your damn babysitter-"

"Come onnnn, Albarn. Please?"

She sighed extravagantly, but there was humor in her voice when she answered him. "_Fine. _Um- ummm- okay, uh, did you know that humans went to the moon once? Supposedly, I mean, it sounds nuts, but I found it more than once, in several pretty reliable sources. They made a ship out of metal. Crazy, huh? Can you imagine standing all alone on the moon, up there in the dark with the stars?"

"The moon," he echoed softly, pressing a hand to the cold glass as an awestruck shiver swept through his body. No wonder Titania had wanted so badly to steal the human world for herself. "Humans went to the _moon_, and now they're all gone."

Albarn sighed again, the quilts rasped, and for a moment her warm palm was heavy on his shoulder. She didn't press him for details on his obvious guilt, which was a relief. He wasn't sure he could explain what Titania had done anyway. A spell like that- a spell that inverted dimensions, a spell that had cost a hundred thousand souls- was so complicated and dark, he barely understood it himself, though he still remembered the smell of ozone and burning flesh. "I mean, not all. Just most. Whatever happened to bring the monsters to this world, it's done and over, and maybe it'll be okay after a while. That's what I have to keep telling myself, anyway. Humans were destroying the world, too. All the living things. _Those _need mourning too."

Soul managed to crack a smile, even though she probably couldn't see it. Unless super night-vision was another one of the weird inhuman talents she didn't seem to know she had. The wind gentled to a soft, heartbroken howl, like a lonely cerberus. "I don't think you and I are made for, uh, non-depressing conversations."

She actually giggled, which was both disturbing and oddly carefree. "Did you know that I always wished magic was real? My whole life. I used to pray for it. I grew up on- well, fairy tales. Don't laugh! And now I learn that it _is, _and I've seen it, and it's just- it's the best thing that's ever happened to me. It's a dream come true."

Soul was rather surprised to find that he was too choked up to talk, but Albarn seemed to understand. She didn't say anything else, and after a while, he heard her breathing even out. All _his _life, he'd been told that humans hated fairies and their magic.

He let flames lick at his fingertips. They came so much easier to him, since he'd met her. He'd tell her the truth about what the fairies had done, someday. It didn't seem so crazy now, to think she might forgive him.

* * *

"Hello? Soul, are you there? Hello-"

"Eeeargh!" Maka shrieked, flailing her way clear of the quilt-nest and putting her back to one of the walls in a split second, before she was even fully awake. The bone hilt of Tsubaki's knife was cold and smooth in her palm as she gaped at the skull.

"Kid! It's me, I'm here, don't go anywhere, okay?" Soul, awakened just as rudely and suddenly as she'd been, thrashed free of his own blanket tangle and went over to squat in front of the skull, sitting next to the door, beside their boots. "Kid! Can you hear me? Hey!"

"No need to shout," said the familiar, silky-smooth voice. It was just as disorienting as last time, to hear it out in the real world, rather than inside Maka's head. "Yes, I can hear you fine Would you mind explaining why you exorcised me _last _time I found you? A bit rude, you know."

"Ha," said Soul uncomfortably, rocking back onto his heels and rubbing the back of his neck. For a defensive, prickly guy, he clearly didn't handle it well when people were upset with him, she thought. "Well, uh, I didn't know it was _you,_ and I didn't really feel like being some other necromancer's meat puppet, you know? I thought it was Titania coming to finish the job."

"Hmmm," the skull said primly. Maka could see two very faint, golden lights within the empty eye sockets, and she watched in horrified fascination as Soul scooped the thing up and held it at a properly conversational, head-high level. With a necromancer possessing it from across dimensions and speaking through it, long-dead bone suddenly became about nine thousand times creepier. "You really didn't think I'd come looking for you?"

"Uhh…"

A loud sigh. "Listen, why can't I move?"

"We only took the skull with us to our safehouse-"

"_We?_ Who's we?"

Soul cringed and looked wildly at Maka, who rolled her eyes and stood up too, sheathing her knife as her initial, instinctual panic faded. "Me," she said stoutly, raising her hand. If Soul trusted this Kid person, despite his exceedingly creepy occupation as a necromancer, she'd have to trust as well. It wasn't like she had much of a choice; her father was in the fairy world, and right now Kid was their only connection there, apart from Rough Voice, who couldn't seem to do anything but make her head hurt. "Albarn. I'm a human. The bird brain here owes me a life debt after I dragged him out of a river, so we've sort of ended up as partners. I'm looking for someone, he's trying to get home-"

"A life debt?" Kid screeched. She had a weird feeling he was yanking his hair out. Assuming he had hair, of course. "Soul, did you listen to _anything _I taught you?!"

Soul held the skull away from his head, wincing as his ears quivered. "Yes! It was an accident, okay?"

"And a human! Do you know what humans do to fairies? _Historically_, human-fae alliances always end badly! You should remember the Avalon treaty of-"

"Ex-_cuse_ me," Maka cut in, deciding that even a freaky possessed skull wasn't allowed to yell at her, when she hadn't done anything but inadvertently save an idiot. "This particular human is extremely useful, thank you very much, and she's got business in your world. Er, I do. I have business. Okay? So there, _bone_head."

Soul disguised his snicker as a cough, not very successfully. His pale hair was even more insane than usual from sleep, she noticed, stifling a chuckle of her own. "Yeah, Kid, she's cool, I swear. I mean, she did save my life. She even saw me eating and didn't freak out… uh, much. She's alone, anyway, I haven't run into any other humans like I did last time."

_Last _time? Maka could have sworn she felt her ears perk up. God knew she had enough secrets of her own, but it was physically painful to keep herself from shaking bird brain and asking for an explanation.

"Hmmm." The skull didn't move, but it did somehow manage to exude a palpable aura of schoolmarm-ish disapproval. "Albarn, you said? Why does that sound so familiar?"

"Does it?" Maka said vaguely.

Soul wrinkled his nose at her, then said to Kid, "Hey, hang on a sec, okay?" Then he unlocked the door to the quilt-room, set the skull down in the hallway outside, and shut the door again, ignoring Kid's startled squawks. "Listen," Soul said to Maka, crossing his arms uncomfortably. "It's obvious he knows your dad. I'm sure Titania's having a lot of fun parading her newest pet human around. Are you, uh, okay talking to him about it? I mean, I dunno if I can convince him to bring you to my world, unless he knows."

She considered that. Outside the door, Kid gave a frustrated yelp.

"..._moon's setting, you know, and you're still here…" _Rough Voice whispered to someone, plucking discordantly at his harp.

Maka sighed as her head began to thrum with the almost-pain that heralded an oncoming migraine. She still couldn't bring herself to call the voice 'Wes', despite what Soul had told her about his brother. "You're totally sure he's not working with that queen?"

Soul shook his head hard, ears twitching. "No. No way. I mean, she sort of ignores him, she doesn't see him as an enemy or anything, and like I said, he's one of her advisors, officially. But he's always been on mine and Wes' side. If it weren't for Kid I'd be just another pageboy doing Titania's dirty work. Or, you know, dead."

There were florid sparks dancing like drunken fireflies around his fingertips as he rubbed them together nervously. Maka stared at them, feeling vaguely hypnotized, the way she felt watching a storm roll in over the golden plains outside Gethsemane. Suddenly she missed her little book-scented apartment desperately. "Okay," she said at last. "But if I end up dead I am _so _haunting you, got it, bird brain?"

He grinned toothily, shook his head, then actually laughed as he went to fetch Kid's skull. "Yeah, yeah."

* * *

"A what line?"

"A ley line," Kid repeated for the fifth time, golden eyeball-lights swirling dizzily in what seemed to be agitation. "Pronounces as in, to lay something down. It's how my kind used to cross over to the human world. Soul, you really should remember this. We spent a month on the subject."

"I totally remember," Soul lied, very glad indeed that Kid couldn't actually see anything through the possessed skull.

Albarn snorted and started scratching idly at the floor again with her knife. He noticed for the first time that there were flowers etched into the handle: a thistle and a morning glory, stinging pain and hidden beauty. How appropriate, and just the sort of symbolism fairies liked. Somebody who loved her, who knew her down to her bones, had made her that knife. He wondered if she would let him meet that person. "Even I've read about those, and I'm just a human. The, uh, the Stonehenge had something to do with those, right?"

"Yes indeed," Kid said approvingly. "Very good."

"Teacher's pet," Soul mumbled, staring at the ceiling and ignoring the dirty look Albarn shot him.

"Anyway," Kid said sharply. "As I was saying, it seems that for whatever reason, your hometown of- what was it?"

"Gethsemane."

"Yes, yes. If the directions you gave me are correct, it was constructed along what should be the strongest latitudinal ley line for several hundred miles. Perhaps that has something to do with why the… ah, the monsters leave it alone- I assure you, there are several who can cross water if they really try." Kid had caught on quickly enough, and he wasn't going to tell Albarn the truth about the monsters and where they'd come from, thank Merlin.

Soul had the uncomfortable feeling that she and her overabundance of brains would put the pieces together soon enough, though.

"Awesome," Albarn groaned, scowling at the poor, abused floor.

"Yes, quite. So if you want to cross over to the fairy world, you'll need to return there before I can complete the spell on my end. I'm simply not powerful enough to pull both of you over without the ley line's help."

Soul surfaced from his mild sulk to squint at the skull. "Wait, then why the hell didn't Titania's banishment drop me there instead of here?"

The golden lights dimmed for a moment. "I'm not sure," Kid said thoughtfully. "Actually, that's a very interesting point. Avalon knows she's got enough extra magic to slop around, what with all that she leeches from the court as tribute. Perhaps she simply used a bit too much juice and overshot."

_Or perhaps fate wanted me here, _Soul thought, shivering. _Maybe I was bait for a mad woman. _Albarn had something important to do in the world, that much he'd grown certain of. She glowed too bright to be anything but a vital agent of change. Fairies knew special humans when they saw them.

Albarn abandoned her destruction, got up, and started pacing, flicking the little metal cap of her battered lighter-thing on and off, again and again. Soul craned his neck discreetly to see what she'd carved; it was an adorable frowny face. With sharp zig-zag teeth. He promptly started staring at the ceiling again, feeling rather hot under the collar.

"So once we get to the ley line, we need the tail feathers from ten blue birds, a pint of beautiful blood, flowers growing on the grave of a young mother, two chairs made of applewood, something ugly made of gold, something dangerous made of green glass, a pure white stone, and red chalk." Albarn ticked off the items on her fingers as she listed them, then shook her head. "What the heck is beautiful blood?"

"Well, the technical definition varies widely in traditional lore, but if you want to go by the druid-era standard, then-"

"Kid, get to the point," Soul groaned.

"Essentially, blood from someone generally agreed to be beautiful both inside and out. If it's a virgin, that helps, but it's not absolutely necessary."

"None of this stuff seems super magic-y. Not very powerful, that is," Albarn said, still fiddling with her lighter. "I mean, birds and rocks? Except maybe the blood."

"You'd be surprised by what's magical," Kid informed her, rather haughtily. "All of these things resonate in a very complex way at the molecular level. It could be worse. Once I spent eight months trying to find the right one-eyed frog for a spell, and when I did find it, one of my students _ate_ the thing. There'd be a lot more work to do if this wasn't going to take place on a ley line, anyway, trust me, you've got it easy."

"Thank Guinevere's green sleeves for small mercies," Soul put in, throwing up his hands. "This is just like being back in lessons!"

"Aw," said Kid, sounding touched and entirely missing the point, as usual. "You're such a sweet boy. Not a very good pupil, but sweet."

"_I swear, Kid-_"

"Play nice," Albarn said, cackling at him. "I guess we'd better pack up, then."

Fuck. The quilts were so _warm_, and to say Soul wasn't looking forward to trying to pass as a human in Gethsemane was the understatement of the century. Plus, getting over the river was going to be a bitch. Albarn hadn't told him much about her human city, other than a few mumbled profanities aimed at someone named Asura; he'd be lying if he said he wasn't nervous. The blue-haired boy and his troupe had lived out in the wilderness, with only their wagons and the wild mountains for shelter. It would be very different in a city full of people. "Oh, right. Kid, how do you repel manticores again?" Soul asked.

"The heart of a king preserved in wine, a stone that floats, a cloak of harpy skin or the song of a dying man," Kid recited promptly. "Why?"

Soul heaved a sigh. "We sort of ran into one the other day."

Kid said nothing for a long, long moment. "Which means it saw your faces. It'll be tracking you. You're very lucky to be alive, then. I'd advise you to cross that river as quickly as possible."

"Your lights are fading," Albarn observed suddenly, squinting at the skull.

"He's runnin' out of magic," Soul murmured, frowning. "Listen, Kid, we'll keep this thing with us. It's easier to possess the same skull twice, right? So next time, you can find me easier?" He'd been so ambivalent about his home, but now, faced with the loss of the first familiar thing he'd seen in weeks, he was terrified.

Albarn's small, warm hand touched his shoulder for a moment. The touch burned even through his coat, as though she were the one who carried fire in her blood. "Come on, I've got room in my pack. We'll keep it there. It was very nice to meet you, Kid."

A faint laugh, sounding like it came from underwater, a thousand miles away. "You too, Albarn."

The skull shook once, and then the golden lights, and Kid, were gone.

"Let's pack," Albarn said briskly, turning away. When he looked at her, she was miraculously unafraid, every line of her strong and fierce.

* * *

They made it out of the city and to the river without being eaten, though strange, hungry sounds echoing among the buildings sped their feet. Albarn took their supplies across first, then carried him through the rushing, hip-high water, boots slipping and skidding on the slick stones.

"Thanks," he said awkwardly, once they were on the far bank, back in the golden, endless nothing.

She waved a hand weakly, panting, chest pumping like a winded horse. "No problem," she squeaked.

He snorted in spite of himself. "You know, it wouldn't be so bad if you weren't such a pipsqueak-"

He only just dodged the rock she threw at him. "Give me a few minutes and we'll get going," she said, still breathless.

"Yeah, okay." Soul spotted a patch of daisies rising stubbornly through the tall grasses. By the time Albarn was ready to get moving again, he had a thick crown of them perched atop his head, and another one ready for her.

She stared at it with raised eyebrows, then took it slowly and settled it gently atop her head, patting the snow-white petals gently. A few dropped to dust her shoulders. "We match now."

"I guess," he muttered, feeling unaccountably embarrassed. It had simply seemed rude to make one for himself, and not her. But the pure, subtle scent of the flowers followed them as they walked into the glimmering, golden plains, mixing with the sweet smell of the grasses they crushed beneath their feet. The sky that he'd missed through the piecemeal wreckage of the city was wide open now, so vast that it made his chest ache, an infinity of beautiful blue.

They walked steadily north as the blue began to slowly deepen, finding a strange, black road that Albarn seemed to welcome. It only reminded Soul of coagulated blood, but if it made her feel safe, he'd trust it. She led them forward tirelessly, walking fast, with that same starved expression in her river-green gaze, hair dusted with tiny white petals. Birds rose up to the sky with loud cries as they passed, then fell to earth behind them again.

They went so long without speaking, it startled him when Albarn stopped and said, "I guess we should make camp. It's getting late."

"Yeah," he said, shaking his head to escape the dizzying seduction of the beautiful earth. "Okay, I'll make a fire. Off the road?"

"A little bit, yes, please. I'll get dinner." She let her pack fall, fished out a few things, and then vanished without a sound. He stared after her, and it took a moment before he realized both his palms were singing with flames, as hungry as her eyes.

* * *

"So what kind of feather do you want for your hat?"

"None of those," he said, snorting as he watched her paw through the pile of colorful feathers that remained from the birds she'd caught. When she glanced up, she couldn't read his face at all in the flickering firelight, though there was still a smear of blood on his cheek.

"Why not?"

"They're just not right."

She laughed a little, then yawned. "Why not?"

"They're just- not. I'll know."

"Hmm. Sounds to me like you're picky," she persisted, hiding a smile behind her hand.

"You're picky," he retorted nonsensically.

"... _and? What then? Tell me all the…_" said Rough Voice eagerly. Clearly, Kid was telling Wes all about his brother's adventures in the human world.

She snorted, then took off the flower crown he'd given her after they crossed the river. It was wilted now, after a day in the hot sun. She patted it sympathetically, feeling a little wilted herself, then winced as it fell apart for good. "Aw."

"I'll make you another one tomorrow," he said quietly, and she looked up, watching him watch her through the leaping flames. "Daisies again? I don't think they're really your flower, but there's not a lot out here."

Her mouth was dry. "What's my flower?"

He wrinkled his nose thoughtfully. "I think whoever made you that knife got it right, actually. Thistles and morning glories."

"Oh," she muttered, putting a hand to the hilt of Tsubaki's knife. "You've got blood on your face."

"Shit," he said, scrubbing at it.

"Don't worry about it."

The next day, as they gathered their things and ate a quick breakfast of dried fruit, he wove her another crown, spiky and intricate, of yellow wheat and sharp, pale-green blades of grass. She laughed as they walked on the black road, feeling as light and fluffy as the few clouds overhead, and she whistled to the birds that fled.

"You are _completely _tone-deaf," Soul said in disgust, sunburned ears flattening. Then he proceeded to launch into an extraordinary series of melodic tweets and chirps. "Ugh, the birds here are so rude," he said when he was finished, glaring at them. "Back home they'd at _least _say hello, after all that."

She started laughing so hard she had to sit down. "_Bird _brain," she gasped, when he looked at her in confusion.

"Oh, hell," he muttered. "Whatever. You know what? You're still tone deaf."

She laughed until she cried.

* * *

"You said you were _mostly _human," she asked, on the morning of the third day.

Soul's steps paused. "Huh?"

"When I first met you. When you were stuck under the bridge."

"Oh." He started chewing on his lip; she was rather surprised he didn't chew it right off with his sharp wolf-teeth. "Well, uh, I didn't think it was the time to explain everything, you know?"

"Yeah. But you can explain now, right?" she persisted, watching her feet eat up the miles, instead of staring at the shimmering, indistinct horizon, edged in far-off mountains, lavender and ghostly-faint, like a dream. They were getting close to Gethsemane, close enough that they'd probably reach it tomorrow, and she was terribly aware of how difficult it would be to sneak him in. If she could see through his invisibility magic, surely other people could, too. Once she _got _him in, assuming Asura hadn't just set fire to her apartment and called it a day, they'd still have to find the blood, and the feathers, and all the other weird ingredients that would get her to the fairy world. _Then, _there in the other dimension, she'd have to fight that awful, snake-clothed woman to get her father back.

Assuming, of course, he was alive. Did fairies ever eat humans?

Soul sighed heavily, and she blinked out of her dark thoughts. "That's part of the reason Titania hates me," he said quietly, running a hand through his madman's hair. "When I was a kid, she was- she was planning something really bad, and my parents found out about it. She had her guards come for them. I tried to use my magic on them, but I wasn't strong enough yet- I've never, uh, been much good at it, really- and it backfired. My brother was fighting too, he's older, and our magic resonated, and I ended up in the human world. I still don't know how it happened. But I was here for a while, and then Kid and Wes brought me back. She's still got Wes in prison, though."

Maka absorbed that. It wasn't the sort of fairy tale she usually enjoyed, to say the least. When she shot a sideways glance at Soul, he was looking straight ahead, lips pressed tightly together. His shoulders were hunched, and there were faint embers drifting around his fingers.

"You'll have to keep an eye on that when we get to Gethsemane," she said softly, pointing to his hands.

"...Oh. Right. Yeah, I will."

Something about the tightness in his voice told her not to ask what had happened to his parents, or what exactly Titania had been planning. "So she imprisoned Wes for fighting back? Why didn't she just kill him?"

"He's about eight gazillion times more powerful than I am," Soul said bluntly, still avoiding her gaze. "She keeps him alive, she lets _me _live, and in return he gives her most of his magic. He's a minstrel. I mean, it's hard for him to play well without his power, but when he's got it all- you should _hear _him."

_I have, _she almost reminded him, remembering the eerie harp music that had lulled her to sleep for so long. She'd been hearing Rough Voice and Silky Voice- Wes and Kid, she told herself- less of late. Maybe she was regaining her sanity, or maybe the fairy magic was weakening with time. She didn't know why, but she _did_ know that she was almost lonely without them. "He must really care about you, then, to give all that up."

Soul started walking even faster, long legs eating up the distance; he was running from his memories. She knew the feeling, and a sudden, sympathetic ache gripped her heart, almost too much to bear. "She hates me because I'm tainted," he said at last. "I ate human food, I've got your world in my flesh now. Like I said, staying here changes us. And my magic's so weak anyway. She lets me live as a warning, and a _joke."_

The sympathy turned to burning rage. "Your magic's _beautiful_," Maka snapped, grabbing him by one lacey sleeve to stop him. He wheeled on her with a futile snarl that showed all his predatory teeth; she met his eyes squarely and planted her feet. "It's true! We'll do something. We'll help your brother get free, okay? You're helping me, so I'll help you."

"I'm helping you because I have to," he said stiffly, drawing back. "The life debt-"

"Don't do that," she said mercilessly, watching the hot wind ripple through the tall grass all around them, watching it push his hair back from his shining, hurt-filled eyes. "Don't lie to me. Please?" He shuddered, looked away, and she knew. "You already are," she said slowly.

"Not- I don't- I don't _want _to!" The pain spread from his face to his voice, shattered glass in his throat and ice on his shivering skin, despite the sun's harsh heat. She saw it all.

The Albarn women were merciless, and hard, and could not love or forgive; all of Gethsemane knew that.

_Fuck what they think_, she thought. _Nobody else can tell me what I am. _"You can tell me when you think you're ready," she told him.

He froze entirely, swallowed, then turned away.

She gave him a moment, let him gather himself there in the empty wilderness while the wind howled around them, a rough counterpoint to her pounding heart. Then she faced north again and started forward.

He followed faithfully, and though he didn't look at her, he did walk steadily at her side. Maka wondered if she'd made him angry, if he would curse her now, or if she'd lanced something poisonous inside him. Telling her the story of his first time in the human world had cost him. She could picture him, a tiny, big-eared boy with too much hair, fearful and alone in a strange, unimaginably scary place. She could picture him finally returning home, only to find his family gone, to find himself shunned by everyone for things he couldn't help. Part of her wished she'd never asked, but as her mother always said, "Never forget, the first sin of women was reaching for knowledge."

"It must have been lonely," she whispered after a while, very quietly, thinking of another child, tiny and blonde, crying for her mother while the city raged outside her door.

The wind stole the word as they fell from her lips, but Soul gave her the tiniest of smiles, and she knew he'd heard.


	7. Chapter 7

Gethsemane was a vast wart of tortured stone and mud, wreathed in smoke. It was _ugly. _He'd seen its dark breath smudged against the sky long before the city actually came into view: an ominous cloud heralding a place he didn't understand and didn't like. The birds around these parts were the quietest he'd seen yet.

"Well?" said Albarn, sounding vaguely nervous.

"Er," Soul tried diplomatically, popping up out of the dry grass to take another peek at the distant, looming walls ringing her putrid city. It was perhaps five miles away, but in this flat place, distance warped. He felt almost as though he could reach out and smash the whole place beneath his fist. Unexpectedly, he also felt a twinge of homesickness, for endless mountains and misty shadows. "It's… not what I expected."

"What _did _you expect?"

Nothing like the architecture back home, of course. But not this hulking monstrosity. "Not big walls like that," he said honestly. "We don't build that way." This was a _fortress_, not a home but a hiding-hole, an animal's den. It drove home once more how precariously the humans survived. There were beasts in _his_ land- like those Merlin-murdering manticores, for example- who'd crash right through the strongest physical barrier. Understandably, nobody bothered to build any. Titania kept her castle and court ringed with nothing but low hedges of nightshade and nettles, watered them regularly with the blood of her victims, old-school druid style, charmed them to predatory sentience in a twist all her own, and used her stolen magic to fend off the court's enemies.

Every single fairy there owed her a life debt by now, he supposed, wincing as he chewed his lip a little too hard. What threat would she hold over their heads after the last beasts crossed over, lured by the scent of human meat? There were so few fairies, and still so much life here. They'd _have _to come. All things needed to eat. He had no idea how long it would take, though. Time relativity between their worlds was still a bit wobbly, according to Kid.

The human currently scowling at his side tossed a rock at him. "Ow."

"Focus! Once more," she demanded, twice as fiercely as Stern Lesson Master Kid ever had.

Soul sighed and put his finger out to catch a ladybug off a blade of grass; it crawled like a drop of blood oozing, cherry-red and gleaming. "You go in the gates as if you're returning alone, I try and follow beneath my camouflage magic. If it works, we're good and I'll follow you to your - _apartment? _Is that the word? Weird. Is it apart from all the other- Okay, okay, _watch _the lace! And if the knights- er, guards. If the guards say anything about me, we run, and you'll get your friend, uh, Tsubaki to sneak us in. Somehow. Which you haven't fully thought of how to do, yet. Right?"

She grimaced and yanked irritably on the cuff of his jacket again. "When you say it out loud it sounds so stupid. But, I mean, there's only one way in! I can't think of anything else!"

"I'm pretty sure they won't see me, I think that's just a weird _you _thing," he insisted, fidgeting nervously and wishing he felt half as confident as he was trying to sound. The ladybug crawled from his finger onto his palm, debated for a moment, then zoomed silently off, away from the city.

"Your house is on fire, your children alone," Albarn mumbled, watching it go with an envious expression. "Oh, and watch your sparks when we're in there, bird brain."

"Fine."

"And listen, run _fast_ if they do see you under your spell, I'll distract them."

"The whole disguise thing still sounds like a better-"

Albarn shook her head so fast her twin tails flapped. "We control the population here to keep the monsters from coming, I told you, every single citizen and traveler is catalogued. My uncle's shit at being in charge but he's great at paperwork. That'll never work, they'll just shut the gates in your face and laugh. Plus-" She waved a hand at all of him, from his ears down to his dirty, tattered shoes. "You don't quite _blend_. Disguised or not."

"Er," he said. "True. Yeah. Fine, let's go."

"I can still see you."

"_You _don't count. Trust me, it's working."

"I don't under- augh!" She threw up her hands and stomped away through the grass, golden brows knitted stormily. Soul cackled to himself and followed, a bit giddy. His magic's hum was a pleasure in his ears, a low and ringing note like purest crystal. He wasn't lying when he told Albarn it was working- it was working better than it ever had, in fact.

They didn't speak as they made their way forward. Grey clouds were creeping steadily after the fleeing sun, casting giant shadows that moved like beasts across the whipping prairie grass. Her breathing was rapid, and her eyes were wide. Gethsemane grew larger and larger before them; for some reason, Soul felt more afraid of those heaven-high gates than he had of the soaring 'skyscrapers' in the empty city.

Two statues watched blindly from beneath their veils as he trailed Albarn to those big doors. They oozed tar and sour scents, and he noticed with surprise that they were brushed with the faintest gleam of magic. Oddly familiar, in all this strange. If he'd been able, he'd have asked her the statues' names, asked what had happened to the left one's wings, but he settled for bobbing a twitchy bow in their direction, just in case. Shrouded faces or no, their stony gazes crawled spidery and slick across his skin.

He did not recognize her voice when she kicked the doors three times and boomed, "_Albarn's back!_"

* * *

Maka hadn't brought back her father alive _or _dead, but she'd returned with a ghost of sorts after all.

Soul trailed faithfully behind her all through the crowded streets so full of eyes and whispers; she'd nearly forgotten that part, the things her name brought her. He tagged at her heels up fourteen flights of uneven stairs; she matched her labored breaths to cover his when they passed one of her fifth-floor neighbor coming down and ignored how strangely intimate it felt. She lived on the top floor, _alone_, a rare privilege in a hideously overcrowded city: nepotism in action. Thanks for _something_, Uncle Asura. It was a bribe, of course, and also leverage for him to dangle over her head, but she tried hard to use the privacy in work against him whenever possible.

Finally at her door, she ran careful fingers over the peeling ivory paint. _Safe_: so close she was shaking. All the fear and fatigue of her journey felt suddenly suffocating. Her mouth was dry, and her jaw ached from the way she'd been grinding her teeth. Soul's panting was hot on her neck as she dug her keys from her pack and worked through her multiple locks.

It smelled like stale air and dust inside. She sucked it in with a huge smile.

"You have, uh, a lot of books?" Soul said, finally peeling away from her to go stand in the middle of her floor, holding up his hands limply like he was afraid to touch. Blurred in the soft light, he looked even more otherworldly than usual, more like the fanged, wild-eyed sprite she'd seen snarling up at her from ink-black waves.

He still had flower petals in his hair, though. Ridiculous.

"Idiot," she ground out, kicking the door closed and clicking speedily back through the locks, keyring jingling. She blew out an involuntary breath of relief when she was done; only her father and Tsubaki had copies of her keys. "I hadn't shut it yet, what if someone heard you? Matter of fact, keep it down, actually. We're on the top floor but, you know." She didn't often have company other than Tsubaki- ever, really. Not that he needed to know that.

He looked startled and confused, and clamped his mouth shut.

"You can _talk_, just don't, you know, yell. Or start clog dancing or whatever," she added, letting her pack fall with a _thunk _for emphasis, and then kicking off her boots for good measure.

Then she stood there dumbly, wriggling her toes in her filthy socks. It was strange having someone else in her home. It was strange _being _home, and returned defeated, returning with her father still in danger- it rankled. Suddenly, here and safe at last, she wanted very much to cry, but certainly not in front of Soul. She didn't know what to do now, exactly.

Her stupid pet fairy stared back, then made a sound like a frog being stepped on and jerked his shoulders in what she suspected was a shrug. "So. What now?"

Great minds, apparently. She heaved a sigh. "I guess- um- well- I'm gonna go wash. You can go after I'm done. Don't rearrange any of the bookshelves, I have a sort of a system, but, um... Make yourself at home, I guess. Seriously, though, don't mess with my things."

Soul snorted and semi-politely aimed his smirk at her ceiling. "You're bad at being a hostess. You'd never make it as a court page."

"Whatever, bird brain," she sniped, and then, equilibrium regained, she went off to coax a bath-full of water out of the building's elderly pipes. Tsubaki had come at some point and thoughtfully left a bundle of kindling to burn. Maka was glad she was alone to get teary-eyed in peace.

The steam and the woodsmoke from her wash room's furnace had fogged her central room when she returned at last. In the day's last light, Soul was a bleached-out daydream peeking through a tiny space in her tattered curtains, which were really two of Kami's very old traveling cloaks. At least he'd had the sense to keep them drawn.

Sparks were playing on his eyelashes when he blinked back to reality. "Hey! Don't kick me!"

"Too late," she barked, glorying in the feel of the shabby carpet beneath her freshly clean feet. Scrubbed, she could afford to be superior, so she made a show of wrinkling her nose at him. "I ran you a fresh bath, you stink. Fairies have baths, right? You won't drown or get stuck, because there's no way in hell I'm gonna haul you out while you're-"

"_Yes, _and I'm pretty sure no," he said, rolling his eyes and making a great show out of limping into the washroom, rubbing his ankle where she'd kicked him. "Look at the sunset," he added, disappearing.

She did, of course.

It was gorgeous. Those dark clouds arching high above the city were painted the prettiest arterial red she'd ever seen.

Her home was, in an instant, less comforting. She closed her eyes and thunked her forehead against the pitted, bubbled glass of the window, then cracked it open a hair so her books wouldn't mold in the damp. Soul was splashing around, and- was he _humming?_

This was not her home again, not yet, she reminded herself, trying to gather strength and purpose. This was mission headquarters, not a place to grow weak. Her father still needed rescuing, and sooner rather than later. They needed to start collecting those weird ingredients as soon as possible, all while keeping Soul and their purpose hidden.

"Easy peasy," she whispered out loud, dragging her old chair to the window and curling up, aching for the rain to start, burning for action. What a bittersweet homecoming. At least she'd mostly lost the voices, a tiny silver lining, though now she had a _vision _of blood-soaked thorns and cold fairy smiles to haunt her mind. "No problem."

At least she knew where to find beautiful blood.

* * *

"Blood. My blood?" said the pretty girl, eyes widening. "Um, well…"

Albarn, hilariously, tried on a simpering grin. She put too many teeth into it, though. "Tsu, listen, I know it's a lot to ask-"

"It's not that. I make blood all the time and don't even know I'm doing it, I'll make more. It just sounds… a bit creepy. And _you, _and… a spell. And your father being kidnapped, and monsters, it's a lot."

"I know," Albarn said miserably. "I'm sorry."

A very gentle smile. "Don't be sorry. It's not that big of a favor, and it seems you need it." The girl laid her arm out on the battered workbench between herself and Albarn anyway, with no more fanfare than that, calm and true. He listened hard with a touch of magic, revelling in the ease of it, and her heartbeat only just sped up. Now _that _was trust.

Soul only realized he was staring when Albarn shot him a strange look. It was very freeing, having magic that actually functioned among beings with none- except Albarn could still see him, and he kept forgetting that as they slithered around her gross city collecting Kid's ingredients. He wasn't wearing his camouflage right now, safely inside this Tsubaki's smithy, but he wished he was.

He kept his gaze from the soft curve of Albarn's clean, golden neck when she bent her head and drew her silver claw, pressing it with quick care to the soft inside of the pretty girl's elbow. "You think?" she asked him, when the little glass vial was full.

"Mmhmm," he settled on. Tsubaki, despite her truly amazing self-control during their earlier introduction, still wouldn't look at him directly, and she swallowed audibly when he answered.

It was weird to have Albarn asking his advice on anything, rather like juggling a nest of fire ants. But this other human girl certainly had beautiful blood. He could practically smell the purity on her. It was a wonder unicorns weren't kicking down her door daily.

"We'll come back next week and get more, as long as you're feeling well," she told Tsubaki, hovering just a little before giving in and (Soul watched in pure astonishment) tucking her friend's bangs behind her ears. "I want to have extra, just in case."

"Smart," Tsubaki agreed solemnly, pressing her fingertips over the tiny wound. "Listen, I'm coming by tomorrow."

"_If _you feel-"

"If I feel better, yes, yes." Tsubaki managed an indirect stare in Soul's direction at last. He worked hard to keep his nervous ears from waggling and tried on a simpering grin of his own. "Aah!"

"Oh, right, the teeth," Albarn sighed, pushing aside the blade of the businesslike knife Tsubaki had drawn in an instant from nowhere. "Yeah. Sorry. I'll explain that bit too, I promise. We have two more things to collect today, though."

Tsubaki stared at Soul for another few seconds (a clear warning even he couldn't miss) then rubbed her forehead and flapped a hand in resignation. "Go, go... I missed you, though. You owe me time. And there's a western caravan due any day. We'll need you."

"I missed you too." There was a lot of depth in those words, Soul thought. He shrugged his camouflage back on as he followed Albarn through the chaotic streets, dodging and twirling around oblivious passerby until he felt he was at one of those stupid ballroom dances Wes had loved.

* * *

He spent the last shreds of his energy telling Albarn how much he hated, absolutely loathed, the ridiculous number of stairs she expected him to scamper up to get to her sky-nest. She muttered something mean-sounding about fairies who didn't even have wings, but by then they'd made it to the top, so she didn't manage to get a really good head of steam going, which was nice.

Soul collapsed right there on her floor, ignoring the immense danger of splinters. "I'm going to die from those stairs. _Die,_ before we ever make it home," he wheezed, shedding his magic with a shudder and watching her nimble fingers fly through all the locks on her door.

"That floor's kind of dirty, you probably should flop over onto your back instead of lying on your face," she advised, stepping primly over his legs and moving into her tiny pantry. From one of the apartments below, a child's crying drifted up. Soul smiled blissfully. Noise meant he didn't have to tippytoe and whisper. "Food?" she asked.

He debated. "What kind of food?"

"You'll take what I give you and like it," she called back promptly, sunshine lacing her voice. Soul sighed. Of course he would.

"Okay."

"Oh, look in my pack! I forgot, I think I thought of something for 'dangerous green glass'."

"But I don't want to move," he complained, doing so immediately nonetheless. It took a minute of rummaging through all the crap she had stashed in there to find anything made of green glass. She hoarded stuff like a dragon. "A bottle's not dangerous. This one's gross, though. Spider-webby."

"Have you never been in a bar fight?" she asked, reappearing with sweetly sour berry preserves spread between slices of gritty dark bread. "Just smash it on something and bam, pointy and sharp. Would that count?"

"I guessss," Soul said, accepting a sandwich and chewing dubiously. "I hope Kid comes back soon. He'll know. It's intent that matters, but also the maker's creation, so I dunno for sure."

They both glanced at the skull. It was sitting very quietly atop a pile of books next to her sole chair, which was upholstered in what looked like nothing so much as stray possum. (Another reason he'd chosen the floor.) "He's probably giving us time to collect _all _the ingredients, so we can confirm they're correct at one time instead of, you know. Him wasting magic with a bunch of visits," she said, nodding to herself.

"Shit. Yeah, that sounds like him."

Albarn swallowed the last of her sandwich, licked her fingers like a peasant, and then leaned back against her bookshelves, looking pensive and misty-eyed. "What should I expect? When we get to, uh, _your _world." She chuckled a little, not looking at him, playing with the edge of her shirt. "I mean, I don't think I could get a person out of Asura's prison. And he doesn't have magic!"

"Well, someone around's got a little, I can see it," Soul told her, brushing crumbs off his lap and trying very hard to remember the layout of Titania's dungeons. "I think you should probably stay hidden if at all possible when we get to my world, Kid'll have already found a place for you, I'm sure. He thinks of everything. I'll have to find out where exactly your dad is, and then-"

"Back up, stop, what do you mean?"

"Huh?"

She hissed at him. "What do you mean, someone here has magic?"

"I- well- there's just a little bit? A few smudges here and there. From the monsters? From the things from my world, I thought, didn't you say they- I mean, the rivers and the walls- aren't they always attacking or whatever? That manticore left a little too, I just didn't-"

He was stammering, and her eyes were vicious slits. "We haven't had anything make it inside in- since before I was born. _Decades_. I can see why you'd think that, but... When did you notice it?"

"When we got here," he mumbled guiltily. "I'm sorry, I just didn't- I didn't think about it, I guess."

She sat back, then, with a rough convulsive snarl, flung her plate at the wall. It shattered.

"_Maka_!" he sputtered, leaping up. "What in all the hells!"

"Asura," she ground out, covering her eyes with one hand. "He's the reason my dad's in your world. He's got something to do with this, I know it. He must- he must have done something, he's behind this. And if he's got magic..."

"Oh," Soul said lamely. "Oh, shit."

* * *

it's hhhheeeeere! god, i'm sorry it took so long and i'm sorry this is so short, i figured something was better than nothing. enjoy :) i'm trying to get my inspiration back haha so i really hope the next chap won't take so long. :) :)


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